Creating 3D Game Characters for Games & Film - Part Two - Game-Ready

1. Introduction Trailer: Welcome to part two of our highly anticipated AA game character creation course. I MotsTimals, a professional freelance three D character artist and your instructor for this course. In part one, which is available on our store, we showed you how to create the high poly of a AA character from start to finish. In part two, we'll be taking that character and turning it into a clean, low poly model, rigging it, texturing it, adding hair, and creating a final presentation that will leave you with an amazing AA game character exactly like you see here. To start, we'll be covering full red topology, teaching you how to create clean and optimized topology that's perfect for both animated and game characters. We'll then move on to creating UV maps, all of which will be done in three SMAX. Once that's complete, we'll move on to Mama zip tool Bag, where we'll make our final texture maps. From there, we'll give our character a rig using something called Acurig which will automatically rig our character. We'll then move on to Blender to pose our character since Blender is a little bit easier when it comes to posing and hair creation. Next up, we'll dive into texturing our character. This will be a lengthy and fascinating chapter where we'll cover everything from the large base materials to the small details that make your character pop. Finally, we'll use blender to create our hair cards and place them and then render everything inside of MamastTolbag four. With over 90 hours of video content, this course is a comprehensive and extensive tutorial series. While it may seem daunting, I'm confident that by the end of this course, you'll have the knowledge and the skills necessary to create high quality game ready characters. We've struck a nice balance between time lapses and real time chapters, and all important topics are narrated and real time. We've also included the Time lapse chapters in real time as a special add on. This course is aimed at intermediate artists who already have a basic understanding of the programs mentioned. Course also comes with auto generated subtitles in English, Chinese, and Spanish. I hope you'll enjoy this course, and I'm excited to see the positive impact it will have on your life. 2. 01 Exporting The Highpoly: Okay, let's start by exporting all of our high polymshes to three dS Max. And also, before we do that, we need to make sure they aren't too high poly to where MAX will be really slow or just crash, or the re topology tools in Max will be really slow. So I'm just going to firstly do this quickly by selecting these folders. And just merging the entire folders, decimating them and exporting them. Now, we could do this by just merging the entire mesh, the entire project and decimating it, but I think that would be a bit too heavy for Zbrush to handle all at once, so we're doing it in parts. And also, if you're spending 20 minutes to decimate something, and after 20 minutes, it fails or something goes wrong, then you've lost 20 minutes. If you just spend 5 minutes doing something and it fails, it's not so much time lost. So I think it's better to do these things in parts when you can. So let's set all of our subtols to high and merge the folder. Okay, let's take a look at our merged mesh. And I think I see a little bit of a problem issue here with these. They don't look like they're on the highest subdivision level, even though I set everything to all high, so let me check them here, and you can see they do look different. These do look higher poly. And this is something you might run into as well, and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out as well. This is actually because we have some dynamic subdivisions here, and they don't play very well with getting merged into other objects or even decimated. You might run into problems decimating if you have meshes with dynamic subdivisions. So what you want to do is apply. And then we can merge these meshes. So let's get rid of this one we did before. And let's merge the whole folder and see if that's fixed it. Okay. Nothing looks wrong, so we can go ahead and start decimating. So for decimation, we'll be using the decimation master over here. You can find in the Z plugins tab and drag it off to the right. Pre process. And this takes a while. So I'm going to skip through it for you guys. Takes about 5 minutes for this part. Okay, the decimation just finished. It took 3 minutes. You can see up there. Now let's try actually decimating our preprocessed mesh. This is pretty good and it's an improvement, but it's still really high. Instead of 20%, let's go all the way down to one. And something like this is kind of what we want. All the volumes are there. We can see lines of stitching and stuff in case we want to align our UV islands with that, you know, or polygon edges, so we can put UVs along stitch lines. And it's quite low in points, so it will not be slow in three max. So I'm going to keep doing this for all the different folders, and this part will probably be sped up. So as you can see, we ran into the same dynamic subdivision issue as before. Quick way to check all of your measures for dynamic subdivisions is to just go to the right area in the menu and then just use the arrow keys up and down to navigate through all of your subtols. So let's do that. Okay, looks like there's another part with dynamic sud these zips, supply them. And another part, the little zipper part. And what's this? Same thing on the other side. And it looks like that's everything for these pants. So now that we've got them sorted out, we can definitely safely merge this whole folder. So now I'm just taking a look at the result, seeing if everything looks like, if everything's on what looks like the highest subdivision level. And I've just preprocessed and decimated it. Now I'm moving on to the pouches. I'm just checking if everything is in the pouch folder that belongs to the pouches. So I found that these little buckle ends here aren't, and they're in another subtol. I'm just splitting them. And I'm moving them in into the pouch folder. Also making sure that they're on the highest subdivision level. I'm checking by turning the pouch folder's visibility on and off, seeing what's left or what's missing. Now I'm just going through the whole list of tools checking for dynamic subdivision and it all looks clean and I've merged the pouches. Now I'm just pre processing them and decimating just like you've seen me do with the pants and the boots. Now I'm moving on to the arm. Like you saw before, I'm going through everything and I'm checking if everything's in the correct folder. As you can see, there's a few bits missing and I'm just dragging them back into the arms folder. This part is connected to another subtol so I'm just splitting it off and moving this one into the folder as well. And it looks like I've got everything now. And I'm going through the list of all the subtols and checking for dynamic subdivision again. And it looks like I've got everything cleared up. So I'm pre processing and decimating again. So I ran into a few issues with decimation here, so I went through a bit of troubleshooting. First thing I did was set the percentage of decimation higher and that seemed to work. So I set it lower again and this time it failed again. So then I changed it to 5%, and that one seemed to work fine. This was an acceptable poly count, low enough to work with in three DSMX, so I just decided to leave it at that. Now, if you really want to get it lower, you can just preprocess the mesh again and decimate. Next up, I'm taking care of the belts. So the belts aren't in any folder, so I'm just moving them all into one folder. I'm just looking at which parts look like they make sense being as one folder or one object because when they input into MAX, all of these folders are going to be separate meshes. So you just want something that's going to make sense in the three dS Max outliner and when you're working. So you don't have to spend a lot of time splitting off parts to different meshes in three dS Max so I'm just going through everything, turning the folder off and on again to make sure I've got everything that I need or if there are things that are in the folder that I don't need. And now that's done, I've merged it all, and I'm preprocessing it. Okay, so I'm applying the decimation here. And moving on to the cloth. This is the same thing you've seen before. So just checking that everything I need is in that correct folder, and then merging it, seeing if everything merged correctly, checking for dynamic subdivisions and applying them if they're there, decimating and giving everything a once over again. Just check that it's not too dense, not too sparse, all your details showing up that you're going to need when you're doing the retopo. I think that's about all there is to say when it comes to this. So I will keep quiet for a minute. An now I'm moving on to the mechanical arm. Now, most of the arm was done in three dS Max. So we'll probably be importing the messages from there into our re topology file because we might be using a lot of topology from them for our final retopo. But I'm going to export everything from Zebra just to make sure that our scale is correct in the final file and that nothing's, you know, slightly misplaced, slightly offset. And, you know, this only takes 5 minutes, so why not do this? A. Okay. Looks like it decimated nicely. All our details still there. But like I said, we're probably going to be bringing in the hi poly subdivided mesh from the DS Max as well, because we'll probably be able to use a lot of the topology there for our log poly. And also, we'll probably be able to do that with a lot of the meshes here in the hypolyZbush file too. But we'll just go back to this Z project and be taking a look at those parts individually once we get to re topologizing them. For now, going through the whole list of subtols and looking at each one individually and trying to think ahead if that topology is going to be good or not. Um I think that's a bit of a waste of time because you're not going to be able to think ahead that far. You're not going to know what you're going to be going with in terms of retpper. So I think it's better to just quickly decimate everything, bring it into the SMAX, start retopping and then look at what you're going to do from there. So all of this just took me about half an hour. So it's not too much time wasted, even if, you know, we don't need some of these parts eventually when it comes to the retopper. So I think it's something worth doing. Next up the head. Normally, I just knock some subdivisions down on the head. Because usually when you're using a base mesh, it has pretty efficient topology already and you don't lose too much volume like this. There's no real reason to decimate. Now here, I'm just going to tie up the last sense, see any meshes that I've missed, and I'm probably not going to bother decimating them because they're all really tiny meshes and they're not that high poly either way. At this point, it doesn't make that much difference. I might drop the subdivision level down a couple. On them. But overall, this isn't really important. These are small parts. They're not going to make a huge impact. I'm also going to export the hair. This is just for fun. It's purely optional. We're not going to be using this for retopo, but I thought, why not? Just so we get a whole picture of the character. Okay, so we've got everything I've decimated or set to a lower subdivision level. So now what we can do is just merge everything, merge visible, I mean, and take a look at our merged character. Now it's only 3.9 million points, which is pretty good. And if we look at our polygroups we have a polygroup for each merged group of objects we did. And I think when we import into three MAX, these will all be separate measures, which will be pretty convenient. So now let's export let's take a look at it in three GS Max. Okay, let's find our file and open it up. So it's about 7 million polygons. That's doable threes Max we don't want to import as a single meth. So hopefully all those polygroups we saw will be separate and everything will be a bit easier to sort through. Oh Okay, here's our mesh. As you can see, the viewport is still pretty snappy, even with 7 million. So that won't be a problem for us. We can turn on viewport statistics. Okay. So now that you've got your mesh in three Max, you're ready to start the actual retper process, and we can move on to the next chapter. 3. 02 Retopologising The Head Part1: Welcome to Chapter two. And this chapter will be starting the actual Rtpology. I think many of you will be somewhat familiar with retopo since this isn't a complete beginners course, but I will go over the basics and reasoning before moving on to more advanced workflows and tricks. The reason we retopo is so models run well in real time and to form properly. Other thing we should keep in mind, which less experienced artists often forget is to keep unwrapping and baking in mind when making your topology. I will be giving advice and hints on that. This video will be sped up in places with repetitive tasks I've already shown once, so don't be alarmed by that. I don't actually move that fast. Without further ado, let's get started. Okay, to start with, I like to set up a material that shows the form of the mesh a little bit better than a default one. So you'll probably have something like this when you import. So what I'll do is get a new physical material. Make the color slightly darker and put the roughness up to something like 0.6 or 0.6 0.5. And now you can see we get some nice highlights that are a bit larger and there's a little bit more contrast with the base material. I think we're going to start with the head. So we're just going to hide parts that are in the way we don't need. This will do. Maybe get rid of these earrings as well. Let's attach all of these parts of the head so you can see since they didn't decimate the head, all the polygroups have ended up being separate objects. Let's see what we're missing a bit around the eyes. Okay, that's everything. Now we can start. I'm going to make a new layer. Which I'm going to keep all of the re top od meshes in. Just go to make a plane. That's just gonna be an empty object to keep our me topologized mesh. We don't actually need this geometry. I'm going to add a symmetry, as well. Set it to X and flip it and make sure the mirror is at zero on the X axis and turn on show cage, as well. Now, this will probably be set to grid by default. You'll want to set to draw on surface and select the mess you're going to draw on. And I like to use three Max to retopo. I use other software like Topo gun, that's retpospecific. But here, especially for demonstration, I mean, once you understand the principles, you can do it anywhere. Topo gun is a really stripped down simple software that just that only lets you retopo. And it's really good and efficient for that. But I also like to have a full modeling toolkit when I'm retpoing, especially when it comes to things like this. I find the extra tours in Max come in handy. And it's not that much slower, especially if you take into account, you know, jumping back and forth between software. I find Max can do everything I needed to do. So we're just going to start by building out a plane. And shifting it in the rough position. Now, when it comes to re topoing faces, the way you do it is you build out loops around areas, you'll build a main loop around the eyes and then a loop around the nose and the mouth. I'm not forgetting anything. We're going to start with the eye loop. That's probably the most important one and basically making some goggles. Now I'm being really quick just to get the full loop in. And later we'll need to do some maps, do some counting to make sure that we have the correct amount of the correct amount of polygons here, correct amount of quads. So we're leaving some space around the eye because we'll be having another loop around the actual eyeball. And the way you want to do retopo for objects like this is keep it at essentially a lower subdivision level than your final result because it's pointless or not pointless, but it's going to be a way more work to be retpologizing in a really high subdivision level, basically, when you could just do it at a lower poly and then subdivide it for the same result. So essentially, what we're keeping in mind is probably in the end result, we're probably going to be subdividing everything, so everything will be double what we see here. So in this case, what we also want is to make sure that this is an even number, so we don't end up with too many polygons later at the bottom, and then you would have to add a triangle to link these up, which would be really annoying. But it's not super important because you can always add and remove when you get to that part. So here I think I'm going to aim for, you know, add a couple more. Something like this, maybe. Maybe this is a bit much. We'll see. I think some extra ones to fill out the snows. And let's conform everything down here. Now, normally, I don't really do face three toppers manually anymore because I have enough base messes that I've made that I can just take one of those and conform them. In this case, I want to show you basically the basics of using the retopo tools in max, the way I go about thinking. And a head is actually really easy thing to show that off on. It might seem counterintuitive. I might seem like a head is actually really complicated, but you only really for a head, have to follow a basic set of rules, and there's a pretty good convention that exists already on how to retopfaces that you need to follow. So there's a lot less thinking you have to do compared to something that's like an oddly shaped, hard surface thing. You're trying to retop and so now we're going to do the loop around the mouth. So same process. Around this area, we're going to keep it with the same number of quads as the eye loop. And we're going to bring it down. What's happened here? How weird. I'm being super rough here and not really counting. Right now, I'm just getting the loop in, and then we'll just use the insert loop tool to get to get everything precise. So I'm going around and through the bottom of the chin. Okay, that's that loop. Obviously, we're going to have to figure out the exact number of edges we need here later. Now we can do the around the eyes. That's basically going to be I'm basically just gonna inset this whole part. Now, it's places like this where maybe top a gun would need me to move so mini vets manually. But this only takes a second. And we're moving up everything up up to the eyelid. So this loop is basically the inner orbit or rather the orbits of the skull. If you can imagine the skull, this would be like the big hollow part you see around the eye, and then the eyelids will be another loop. Or Okay. I think that's fine. Now we can do the loop around the mouth. Now, I didn't really leave enough space for it here. So let's move this out a little bit. Again, I'm being super rough and just doing a random number, and we'll even out the numbers of edges later on. And honestly, I'm a little bit rusty on doing face three tacos mainly because like I said, it's not something you'll be doing later on, especially in studio. Usually, they'll already have a base mesh and you'll just be conforming it to a head. I might even show you how that's done. But for now, you know, I'm just showing off the tools in three years Max and showing off the basic workflow on a nice smooth object that is the head. So the last essential loop is the one around the nose. So we can start doing that one. This one can get a little bit confusing, but, you know, just keep everything low and remember you'll be adding more loops later and not worry about everything, you know, there's out number of loops being precise right now. You know, it's getting a little bit hard to see. So what I can do is turn this to transparent. Looks like I had a symmetry set up wrong. We want to flip that. Now, this might let us see a bit more clearly. Now, I'm getting a bit confused, yeah. But I think I can figure it out. Okay, that's starting to look correct. I think I've got it right. So here's our basic really rough loops, which we're now going to refine and make sure they sort of add up so we can link them up without ending up with a bunch of, you know, extra loops that we're going to have to add a triangle to connect to. So here's where we need to start counting and making sure that we can bridge everything correctly. So we can start by bridging this part. And moving everything a little bit closer in the eye, especially here. Now, of course, there's a lot of tweaking that goes into this, and, you know, once we subdivide, we'll probably give everything a nice little pass and double check it. Thank, let's make this way smaller. We don't need it that big. Now, it's all a bunch of back and forth. I'll probably once I get all of the main loops in, just do a time lapse of me adjusting every single point, just so this doesn't take up a huge amount of time. Now I'm just gonna do this. Okay, let's connect the nose to this part. Now, here we can see we need an extra loop. And we probably want some more polygons here to sort of define that nostril. Now, this part should probably start going like this because it's going to be descending into this nasalbial loop. And we're probably going to need some extra loops here so it can actually connect. Something like this, maybe. Now, this is starting to look like something. So let's keep going and just connecting everything up. Now, the last area to fill in is here and the lips, of course. We'll get to the lips a little bit later, as well as the eye sockets. So here, Wo I'm going to add a loop here. And we're just going to bridge these and we're going to add a couple of loops here so they can all connect. And that's basically we're halfway done here. Now, of course, our loops pretty uneven for now. We're going to have to go through a whole level of smoothing everything out. But the basic structure is here. And we can move on to these eye sockets. So I think I'm going to make this solid again. Because here we're gonna want to see the actual mesh more than no retpper mesh. And will do the same again to get the inner eyelid. Now, it's really important. This is probably one of the most important parts of a character. Not a character, but of the head is getting this nice thick eyelid down that really helps sell the eyes. So we're definitely going to be coming back here and making sure this is right and reads well. For now, we're going to move on to the lips, and that's just going to basically be the same thing. Mm. I'm going to work a bit blind here because I will be adding another loop to the inside. This corner of the lips can get messy. It's kind of a trouble area. And let's just add this loop. Okay. That's basically the hardest part of the work done. The parts that's most important is getting these basic loops in that follow the structure that not only do they follow the curves of the face properly, but also they nice and neat. There aren't any poles or angons. I mean, there's a few poles here and there, but they're not in important areas. And everything loops nicely. I'll be easy to rig and it'll animate and deform well. So from here, we're just going to be adjusting, building up the back of the head, which isn't that important because the skull doesn't deform. It's just a face that deforms. So this is the hardest part of retpoing the face done already. I'm going to move into time lapse here because I've shown off and explain the more complicated parts in real time. And from here on, it's just going to be a lot of adjusting and fiddling. And I won't be introducing any new tools or there won't be much to explain either. The next chapter is going to be pretty time lapse heavy. There's going to be some commentary, but most of it is just going to be sped up footage. I'm also going to include the real time footage without any commentary, which will be named Chapter three Real Time. Thanks for watching and see you in Chapter three. 4. 03 Retopologising The Head Part2: Welcome to Chapter three. Most of this chapter will be time lapsed. The untime lapsed video will be titled Chapter three Real Time. Feel free to take a look at that if this one is going too fast, but I feel like this one is still easy enough to follow along with the time lapses. There will be some occasional commentary in this chapter. The real time chapter will have no audio, only this video will have commentary. So you'll want to watch this one thirst. Please enjoy the chapter. Here I've noticed something not quite right with the loops under the nose, so I'm going back and adjusting it slightly. So I'm just deleting a few faces, and I'm going to be redirecting a polyloop to curve nicely under the nose instead of just going straight. M. Oh Okay, we've got most of our topology in. Now, of course, this is all really irregular. You know, the loops are going wherever. This isn't very well smoothed out. But once we have everything in, especially on areas like this where there aren't any details that you really need to make sure your loops are following, you know, you're not having to worry that your loops are going around the nostrils correctly and stuff like that here. So you can just use the relax tool pretty freely in places like this. So I don't put as much work into adjusting everything as I go along. I just, you know, rush ahead into getting all the loops in, and then I just use these tools to smooth everything out. Now, I might want another loop at the back of the head here, so I'm going to but I'm going to leave it until after I've done the ears to see if to see what I'm going to do about that. So now we're gonna move on to the ears, and we'll almost be done. So I'm gonna drag out slightly bigger space around the ears. And also, I'm gonna want to have this visible because there's lots of details of the inner ear that I'm going to have to, you know, Well, basically, it's more important that I see the base mesh than the other mesh right now. Now, on a part like the ear, topo gun would be nice to use, but I'm just going to finish up in three D Max. So let's move the back parts closer in to the ear. Move this part in. Now, the ears are a pretty tricky part. And actually, there's a lot less convention on how you should do them because, you know, a lot of the times, not much attention will be thrown the way of the ears because they're less important. They're not going to deform. And, you know, sometimes they'll do a really messy dt job with a bunch of triangles just to, you know, be efficient. Other times, you know, It really depends. So here, I'm going to try and go for something that maybe is a little more detailed, at least hopefully, you know, not just a bunch of triangles and, you know, flat plane. I've deleted the end gone in the middle that was left over from capping off that area, and now we're going to move into a time lapse. Everything from here on is pretty straightforward. We're just using same tools, same techniques, and just playing around, figuring out what's the right topology. Now, it's nice to have a nice clean loop that goes all the way around that ear, especially when it comes to UVs because you'll be able to just select this poly loop and split that whole ear off as its own UV island. Otherwise, you end up having to have a jagged UV seam, which is kind of ugly. U a Don't. Don't Around the back of the head here, behind the ear, I was a little bit confused trying to figure out where to put that extra poly loop from the ear until I just realized I could add an extra loop to the back of the head because it probably needed one anyway. So yeah, that was just a little bit of a lapse in fort, I guess. Um, right before finishing, I'll return to these loops around the eye and even them out a little bit more. Now, let's just do the mouth. And now let's just close up the mouth, because we're not going to be doing the mouth bag in this tutorial. I don't usually do a mouth bag for a portfolio piece. It's a lot of work. It's a hassle to bake, and it's a bit much to cover in this tutorial. It's not actually that complicated. Um, but I don't think it's really something that's expected to see in a portfolio piece, because, uh, Generally, a studio will use the same mouth for every character. And it's not really a huge task that a lot of artists are going to be doing. It's probably going to be, you know, one person that makes the mouth. Well, in short, it's pretty neat skill. It's not super essential to the job. I don't think it's going to be it's not a portfolio deal breaker. And, um, it's generally I don't think it's something worth doing unless you really want to have your character in a pose with their mouth open or something. And if you were going to have a mouth bag, you would sculpt your model with its mouth open because otherwise, baking is basically impossible with a closed mouth. So we're just going to go with this. And we're done for the sort of low low poly. Of course, we are going to subdivide everything because something like this sort of been acceptable maybe ten years ago. I might still fly for, like, a background character these days. And, of course, for a lower LOD as well. LODs are levels of details. So, you know, the further away something is, the game engine will swap it out for something lower resolution, but that's not really important here in this tutorial. So what we're just going to do is subdivide everything, and then I think one subdivision will be enough to get it to a nice, you know, current gen standard. Right now, this is at Oh, let me turn on statistics. 2000. Um, so when we double it, it'll look something like this. We could go One higher. Let's see. This is a bit over the top, I think. Um, this is fine for a portfolio piece. Let's just make sure that symmetry is working well. Here, I'm just fixing a few issues with the symmetry modifier. You'll get these issues if your vertices don't quite reach the mirror or if they go past it unevenly or diagonally, if you have an edge crossing the mirror diagonally, you'll get a stray vertex in the middle of the edge. Now, later on, I fix that with turn to polymodifier, and I'll talk about that later. Here I wasted a bit of time doing it all manually. I could have done this faster if I just selected all of the edges and move them across a bit and then conform them. Or you can mess a bit with the freshold settings in the symmetry modifier. But it's important not to make sure your weld doesn't go too far and start welding together vertices in places you don't want. A So I'm just using a turn to polymodifier, and taking remove mid edge vertices to get rid of any stray verts that are leftover from the symmetry modifier. Okay, let's take a look at our repologized head. Well, it looks pretty good, I think. We've got nice loops. Especially around the face part where it counts. I think this is important for animators and people that rig faces. And it's also going to help us unwrap. So we've got loops in all the important areas. And the rest of the head is pretty even. Smooth enough where we can't see any pointed parts, even from close up. We're capturing all the detail we need. So this is fine. And that's how you we topologize ahead. So I think I've shown you all the basic re topper tools in three DSMAx here. Next up, we're going to be probably moving on to the shoes or something like that. I haven't decided yet, but I'll start introducing some of the more of the tricks I use to speed things along. And I also might cover how to wrap the topology of a preexisting head to this head in the next chapter really quickly because this isn't know, I don't read topo heads manually myself very often anymore, because, you know, I think it's something that's good to do a couple of times just to learn what a good topology is and so you can make your own base mesh to use. But once you have that, once you've done it a couple of times, or, you know, do it once every couple, you know, once you learn something, challenge yourself, do it again. But once you've done it before, you know what you're doing, you know what God Topo looks like, I just wrap or use a base mesh with Good Topo you have your UVs done. And it saves a bit of time. And that's what people in studios do as well when they're working. You won't catch a guy re tapoing every single head manually because basically, every single face can use the same topology. And that's actually a good thing to have if you want to have, for example, texture maps that can be swapped between characters or, um rigging. I'm pretty sure it can be transferred if the topology is, you know, it's easier to transfer face rigging and stuff like that, or wrinkle maps, blend shapes, all those sorts of things. So, um, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in Chapter three. 5. 04 Retopologising The Shoes Part1: Welcome to Chapter four. In the last chapter we tackled Rtopowing the head. In this chapter, we're going to do the boots. Now, since the boots are symmetrical, we're only going to need to do one of them. The first thing we're going to do is hop into our Z brush file and check out which parts we can bring in to help us with the re topology. Check out which parts have a good enough topper where we might be able to use some parts in the low poly. We're going to turn on polyframe mode to see the topology, and we're also going to set all of our subtols to low And when you're zooming in, it's zooming in off center. All you need to do is click somewhere on your mesh, and it will start zooming in onto the part you've clicked on. These parts look a little soft in the low subdivision level for some reason. Let me see why that is. No, it's because of dynamic subdiv Now, these look pretty good. We're going to be able to use these in the low poly. Same with these. Okay. A lot of this might be salvageable as well. And same here. These parts, not so much. You could go in and start deleting a bunch of these loops, but we've got stuff like this going on here. So I'm just going to be taking these parts. So to do that, let's just hide everything and make these parts visible. Let me check these as well. Yeah, we can bring these along, too. And we can just export these visible parts. So we're going to use the FBX exporter. Because the OBJ exporter doesn't have the options to export only the visible parts. And you can find the options down here. Now, we don't need stuff like this. I don't think there's any options we need to check here. Just make sure visible is checked. If you've got it set to ASCE, sometimes you'll run into issues with importing, so I just said to Ben. Normals don't really matter here. We're just using these measures for re topology that we're not using them to render or anything when I export. And import them into our Maxine. Now we want to import into this layer so make sure that layer is selected, or we can make a new layer specifically for imports. How about we do that? And I'll rename this one to re topper, as well. So make sure that's clicked and we can import. I got the input scale wrong here. I just left this bit in so you can see where you need to go to change your input scale and get it right. That's better. Now, 'cause it's symmetrical, we don't need half of these. I'm gonna attach all of these parts together and delete all of the parts on the left side, which we're not going to be used because we're gonna be using symmetry. A Okay. I'm going to start with the sole and then do all the fabric parts and do the belts last. Well, we might do the belts and fabric parts together because I think we're going to make them the same mesh. I'm just going to check if there's a part missing here. Now, it looks like that's what it's going to be like. I'm going to apply that dark beds and material to all of these that I showed you in Chapter two, I think. And we're going to start just looking this part by itself and getting rid of the parts we obviously don't need. So like the interior is definitely not something we need. O. Now, this part was manually done in three S MAX, which is why it has or top of uneven, which is why it has pretty good topology. Sometimes a ZR mesh will also give you topology that's a good start, but not always because it likes to make spiral meshes. So we're pretty lucky in this case. And this is a pretty common workflow with more hard surface assets. It's quite common to just go through and delete all of the extra supporting loops. That you're not gonna need on the low poly. And of course, you add a few extra loops. Not even loops, but just extra geometry where you need it. Like in this area, we're going to add some stuff. Definitely don't need all these, let's see. Let's see how that affected the silhouette. That's one thing you're going to be the main thing we're looking for when we're doing retop is maintaining the silhouette while also keeping the topology low enough. So in this case, silhouette is basically unchanged when we do this. We can collapse a lot of these down here, but I'm going to do that later. I'm going back and forth a bit just to see if, you know, I got didn't change the silhouette too much. Now, along these curved parts, we're obviously gonna need more geometry than what we have right now. Don't be afraid of deleting too much because we can always add that back in later. Okay, I think we need the original mesh now. I'm going to add asymmetry. Can use the letter keys to sort through this list. As for symmetry, E for ddiPoly Make sure this mirror is zero on the X. Okay. Actually I might make this stal. Let's also hide everything. It's not the boots for now. Control E to invert selection. Okay, it looks like there's a bunch of these details. Now I'm going to have to decide whether we need them in topology or we can just bake them flat. Now, stuff that's on the bottom of the boot. That's a pretty unimportant area. So you need to decide if you're going to spend like half an hour making all these bubbles or if you're going to bake them down onto a flat plane, and I think I'm going to bake them down because they will look fine on a flat plane. But, you know, once we get to the baking stage, if I feel like it looks wrong on the bake, then I might go back and add them back in. But for now, I don't think I'm going to spend time on that. And let me just see which one's the actual sole. You can see we definitely need more geometry on the toes and over here. We probably don't need all of this stuff and maybe some of these. Okay. After all, the boots are the least important part basically of a character. It's probably going to be furthest from the camera and not the first thing a person is gonna look like on a character the first thing a person is going to look at on a character. This edge flow. I'm not sure if I'd like that on a low poly. So I'm going to start fixing it. Sure. A way I work with holes like this is I cap them off. Now, you can't see the cap because it's hidden in another in the high poly, but if I isolate, then you can see it. And once you've got the cap in, you can just use the cut tool to cut your desired topology in instead of having to use all of these tools. And then you just conform it to the high poly. So here, I'd prefer for it to just go straight down. So we can better capture this sort of bulge here. I think I'm going to remove a few more. And to delete a straight edge, you just hit black space, nothing else. And you can see the plane is still here. So I'm just gonna use the cut tool, or actually, maybe I should move some of these around to where I want them. Now, I think there might be a few more loops I want to get rid of here still. I still looks pretty heavy. We don't need all of these at the back or in here. You can actually start getting rid of them. What I'll do is select the first one, not even the plast one. You can select this one if it's easier. Maybe I'll leave one down the middle and we'll grow a loop. Around to here, because we still want to keep these at the back to get that curvature at the back. But over here, there is no curvature. I'm going to leave this one just in case there's some deformation. And so it's not so hard to reduce these down. Having an extra loop here for nicer poly flow is okay. I'm just thinking how to approach this corner, something like this. I'm not sure we need this edge either. Since we can just move this one up a bit. Now, to do stuff like that, you can use the edge constraints over here instead of relying on these free form tools. Just move this up a bit. And this is why I like to use three DSMx. I don't think in topo gun, you can import measures you've already done, just adjust them like this. This is the benefit of using a full modeling toolkit for retopo Okay. So the main reason I went into this is to better capture this sort of curve here with les topology. So what I want to do is go down along the curve, whereas before it went sort of diagonally, that's fine for sculpting, you know, but it's not the most efficient way, which, you know, it isn't an issue in Zbrush, but I'm just going to start bringing these across. I might want to move this whole loop down, actually, closer to the edge because this is where we want more topology where you've got stuff like this, curves. And then the straight part, we don't really need that much. So of course you run into that these here. So you just got to pay attention for stuff like that. And yeah, retopo it's a bit of it's not a lot of manual work. That's the only way to get something to, you know, look nice. There's no automated solution for retopo yet. There is, you know, ZiriMsha, all those things. They're nice in some cases, but on a character, you know, characters are, like, a major expensive part of a game. So there's no sense in, you know, cheaping out on Retopo and then having something that looks janky on screen. So basically all character retopo is done manually. Mm hmm. No one's gonna cheap out on something like this. So it's just something you've got to put up with and, you know, do, even if it is a little bit boring. Now, hopefully this one doesn't take too long. But yeah, it's a fair amount of work. Now, we do need more topo here, even though here we don't need that much, we're gonna have to add something else to fill in this nice curve. Now, actually thinking about it. We might just bake this down into a flat line. Let me have a little bit of think here. Yeah, we're just going to bake this down. We don't need the actual geometry for that. We're gonna maybe have a little bit of geometry down here where it flares out, but up the top, we're not I so yeah, I'm going to leave a bit of geometry here for this part. So early on, once you have all your quads in, which in this case, we've just borrowed them from the zebra sculpt. But in other cases, you'll be drawing them out manually. First, keep everything simple, and then you're going to be going in and adding your extra cuts for detail like I'm doing here. Move this part closer to the edge. And you want the most geometry in part where it curves. So, this corner here. I'll move that loop even closer in, so we have a little bit of extra curvature right up to the edge where curvature starts kicking in, and then we can move this part up a bit higher. Going to need to do some work there? I think it's spark lycran as well. We need more geometry here. You know what? We can just do this. It's gonna add an extra point here for us as well. What we need? And, yeah, this is just takes some time. So I might move into time laps a bit later on as well, but for now, I'm gonna do this in real time. I sort of running out of things to talk about here, but maybe I'll come up with something. We'll see. So for now just hold on and watch we work on this. M. You can see maybe in a close up, you might get this extra little indent detail here from this angle with the help of this topology and also to help the bake a bit. Now, let's just, uh, get rid of this extra geometry here. We can just triangulate it away. Now, triangles don't matter on the low poly. Especially in areas like this. Now, you want to have your triangles reasonable and not super thin because they might bake poorly. And, you know, this is an area with less deformation. There might be a bit of bending on the heel still, but it's not extreme and it's not like on the face, which is an area you're really focusing on. And the face actually has a lot of deformation around the arm eyes, and it's sort of like has to be spot on. Here, this is just going to be a little bit of bending on the heel at most. So this is a super important part. So here we can have a few more triangles for the sake of efficiency. And again, always be checking your silhouette just by moving the camera along. Okay, so I'm slightly speeding up the footage now. This isn't going to be a very time lapse heavy video. I'm still going to be doing lots of commentary on this one. But this part is a little bit boring, and, you know, I can just speed through this a bit. I'm just adding extra edges where I need them. Because these are around parts, they do need a few more extra edges than, say, a more flat part. So especially because the heel of this boot is round and it's got round details on top of that. So some of these places need, quite a few verts to look round so yeah, just using the loop cut tools and the basic cut tool to cut those in, shift them around where they need to be. And also making sure I don't go too dense. Now, a nice trick if you want to add loop cuts and you don't want them to propagate across your whole mesh is to just delete those faces, and then the loop cut won't be able to propagate. You can just add in the cuts you need and then quickly put those faces back when you're done with that part. Right now, I just left those parts empty and didn't add a face. So here I want to delete some edges from the bottom of the hood. So I'm just going to select every edge, the start of every edge loop that I want to select and then use the grow loop command to sort of grow that selection out downwards and then delete. Now I'm going to bridge cross between these two parts of the sole. And I'm going to be re topoing these straps into the surface of the low poly. I'm not going to have them separate partly because this is a pretty low priority area at the bottom of the shoe. So we kind of want a safe topology instead of modeling a whole separate strap. It's better to have it modeled into the shoe because it's not really hugely visible. Uh, you know, it's not really up in your face where sometimes you might model a strap separately if it really is in an area that's up in your face, like, you know, something would be visible in portrait shots. Here, it's literally the bottom of the shoe, the part. So carrying on work with the sole, you can see why I've sped this part up. I think these are all pretty self explanatory things that I'm doing here. I'm just using the bridge tool, selecting the edges I want to bridge across, adding swift loops where I need them. So I think this is all the stuff I've shown you how to do before. So no reason to waste your time watching me do it slowly again. Now, when it comes to deciding whether you want to model something into the surface of your object or have it separate, like the strap, for example, which I'm modeling into the surface of the low poly, it depends on a lot of things. One of the main ones is poly count. If you're trying to save polygons, if you have a budget you need to hit or if it's an area that's low priority, then you can model it into the surface, and that'll save you some polygons. If you have polygons to spare, you can do it separately. Other things you might want to consider is how easy it will be to rig. If you have your straps separate, they'll be harder to rig, and that'll need more attention, and no one wants to spend more time on the bottom of the foot with rigging and making sure this strap doesn't clip into the foot when you, you know, bend it. So those are basically the main things I consider when I decide on whether to have a strap separately or not or other things, you know, like belt buckles or off the top of my head, I can't think of any things that are kind of like a strap, but you get the idea. Now, I'm just going to bridge across from here to here. So I'll just use the extend tool and make a couple of loops. We'll add in the rest later. Control Shift W is the hot key for the target World tool. And when you're using this hot key, it's also important to remember that it is dependent on which selection mode you're in because the target World tool behaves differently in edge and Vertex mode. So if you want to weld vertices to be in Vertex mode when you use this shortcut. Now I'm just bridging across the toes using the extend tool. And just getting those main loops in which I'm then going to use to connect up to the tips of the toes. And if you have geometry that's stuck underneath the surface of your hi poly and it's hard to reach, and the conform tool isn't really working because the conform tool, it doesn't work when the distances are too big or if there's several layers of geometry in the way. But the drag tool seems to always be reliable. So that's why I usually switch to the drag tool if I'm having trouble with getting some vertices to pull through to the surface and snap to the surface. Now, I'm just going to get rid of these clips because they're going to get in the way of the topology. So I'm just detaching them from the hi poly. And hiding them. And right here, I'm adding another Edit poly, which is a good way of sort of keeping a snapshot of your progress on the mesh without having to make a copy of the mesh or save a copy of the file. You just add an edit poly and everything that you've got up until there will stay in that in the lower Edit poly and all of your new changes will be added to the new Edit poly that you've added. And you can just disable that if you want to go back, or you can delete it. The only thing you can't do is go back and edit the lower edit poly levels without deleting your higher ones because it will mess them up. But what you can have on top of added poly is procedural modifiers, so like symmetry and mirror and turbomove, all sorts of things like that you can have on top of an added poly because they're procedural. They'll just apply the same operation regardless of the underlying topology, but Edit poly isn't procedural. It's manual, so that's why you can't edit a lower edit poly and then go back to higher ddt poly. You sort of have to work in the higher one if you do that. But it's still useful to have the snapshots if you want to go back. So that's why I keep adding added poles as I work along. So I've got these main loops in, and from here on, it's just a matter of connecting them up. So you can see here sometimes isolating my view, so I can just see the low poly because for bridging pots together, it's not really important to see the high poly and it can be a little bit more clear. So remember, you can use that isolate button at the bottom of the screen too, or its just isolate the thing you have selected, if that makes things a little bit easier to see. Now, what I'm going to do here is inset around this little piece of fabric that's on top of the whole sort of sock part. And a good thing you can learn here is sort of think about what polygons you can select in order to make your selections faster with the grow button. So here you can see I only need to select the two middle polygons and click Grow once in order to select everything I need. Instead of going in and selecting like ten faces individually, you can just select two. So that's a neat trick to know. So you can see, I tried to use the conform tool there for a second, and it didn't really work. And this is why I prefer three Max to Maya because the drag tool in three Max is always reliable. It'll always work. And I've had trouble in Maya with getting vertices to snap to the topmost face when there's several layers of faces. And, you know, that also happens with some of Max's RtpoTols like the conform ones, but the drag tool is always reliable and it always works for me. So that's why I like to stick to three S Max. So I like three Max, but the software really doesn't matter. Like, once you learn one, then the others come really quickly. Like, I found my way around blender within a week. Just once you know how to think, then it's really quick to learn a new software. Now, what I do like about MAX is all the UI buttons. I don't have to memorize all the hot keys, which can get tricky when you use a bunch of different software. So moving on to the toes, I use the connect tool here instead of the swift loop tool because that's an endgon and the Swift loop tool doesn't work on endgons. I'm just bridging stuff up here and removing that polyloop that goes around the sort of edge of this rubber part because if I leave it in, then I'll have to work with twice as many vertices. And if I do need it later, it's just a matter of adding in a loop cut. But now, while I'm re topping and doing this basic work, I don't want to move around twice as many vertices. I'm not sure if I'll add it back in at the end. We'll see if it's necessary. But for now, I'm getting rid of it just so I don't have to mess around with all those extra verts. I'm adding in an extra loop for each toe just so we can have a little indent between each toe, like on the high poly and just sort of wiggling things around into position, adding extra loops where needed. Yeah, something like this. Okay, now let's see what we're dealing with. One thing you might like to do instead of spending time modeling everything is to take a screenshot. Or, you know, use a Snip and Sketch tool. And then here we can sort of sketch out what we're going to do with our topology. I don't use this personally very often, but it can be helpful because it's quicker to, you know, sketch stuff than it is to model it. So I'm going to start, you know, just by doing these main ones. You know, definitely have a loop around here, and we're probably going to continue this because we do need the extra curvature here. Let's see. I think this has a functioning eraser. Yeah, it does. We could do something like this. This might be a valid way to do it. We'll see about that. Then we'll figure something out there later. We're definitely going to need an extra loop here. So that's no brainer. These we can just do like this. Now, I might put up there's guides you can find on how to reduce polygons. So I'll put one of those up on screen now, and you can also find them yourself. So Polycount has a lot of good resources on this. And a bunch of these guides on reducing polygons. So you can follow these guides and all those others on ways to reduce polygons. But the thing is, you're always when you're reducing is, Odd step amounts result in a triangle. So you're only ever going to be able to reduce four to two or, you know, six to three. You're not going to be able to reduce two to one without not two to one, three to two without resulting in a triangle. So that's something to keep in mind. But on a mesh like this, triangle isn't worst thing in the world. You can even have triangles on the head. Lots of games do it. It's just important to know where you're putting those triangles, and if they're going to mess up deformation, a lot of time triangles can improve deformation when animating. And on hard surface assets, it doesn't matter. The only thing you're modeling for is silhouette there and also making sure you get a really nice bake, because getting a nice bake on a hard surface asset is a little bit trickier than on an organic soft thing like this. So, let me see what I planned out here. It looks like we do have that extra edge. So instead of connecting this to here, we can just go straight and then do something with this later. I'm just going to put this on my other screen. A Just go to cap these and delete these extra edges. When I loose the cut to. There it is. Her. I'm gonna move this up because we are gonna have an extra loop cut. Or, actually, maybe this, uh, we'll see once we get there. We're gonna add those extra loop cuts. We only need two here. And relax it up a bit. The toes, you know, deform quite a lot when they curl up. So we do need a bit of extra tomolotry here. And this looks fine. Let's see how many polys this is. This is 3,000 for both, so that's definitely okay. Of course, it's probably going to be closer to maybe 6,000 once we're done. Uh let's see. I'm going to do these? Now, I didn't explicitly go over these. I mentioned that you can hover over to see the shortcuts in the last chapter with all the time lapses, but in case you missed that, yeah, all of these tools have different functions. Step build, I only really use to, you know, build out the first few polygons. And then from there, I use extend. And I think for all of these, control shift and LT is drag vertexes around. Then with optimize, the only thing I really use it for is shift to world vertices to each other. It's just a faster way of using Target World tool and then extend mainly I use shift to drag out extra polygons or control shift to drag out two of them. And that's pretty much most tools I use here. This one is a relax conform, so it relaxes while conforming to the surface. Sometimes it's not perfect, and you need to go over with another conform. If it's, like, a more regular surface, and this is move conform. And I don't really use the other ones. I have used them occasionally, but they're not as common. I'm not really sure about this part, but we'll see later on. This is a bit annoying how it hof us up. And, you know, what I think we might do is re top of this part that sticks up separately. So for now, I'm going to detach it and call it something memorable like toe square. Now, moving on to the toes here, standing a few extra loops, also making sure that it'll be the right number to be able to weld them into the bottom of the toes. And just adding a loop here to support the curvature of that rubber piece on the bottom of the toe as well. And, you know, just making sure every single vert is in the right place. Sometimes you do have to go in and move every single vert around manually. And because this is a tight area with lots of curves, I do end up needing to add quite a few edge loops into this area. But it is important to maintain a perspective on how small that area is and how important it is. So sort of step back and make sure you're not adding too much density. Here, I do feel like I get a little bit bogged down on this area. And spend a little bit too much time on it, but it's not the end of the world. Here I'm trying to support the curb that it goes from a horizontal curve across the foot up into that sort of vertical direction. I want to add an edge loop that follows that and that'll help the silhouette and it'll look a little bit nicer, but I also want to make sure that I don't overdo it and add too many edge loops. What I did here is just adding one, which will make capping off that empty hole in the tip of the toe a little bit easier as well. And I think that's a pretty good solution for this area. And all that's left is to shift around every single vertex and make sure it's in the perfect position and I decide to add an extra loop across the middle of each toe. For this, I use the connect tool instead of the swift loop one because that one would go all the way across the bottom of the foot and that would be annoying. It's fine to just leave ons laying around, like I'm doing here, because we can always use selection and go into plane mode and select by sides. Then, you know, select more than four and you'll see them. And you'll just be able to go through the whole mesh and clean them all up at once. I Now, these days, you can go pretty high with polycunts. But also, there's a bit of a trade off where if you have your polycount too high, it's so much work, so much extra work to retop something to, like, 200,000 tries instead of, you know, 100,000 unless you are just doing a retopp and then subdividing on top. But if it's for a portfolio piece, that sort of just makes you look like you don't really know what you're doing. En games use more polygons these days, um, in a portfolio, they kind of still want readable topology, and if it's super dense, then it's harder to read in screenshots. If you're going to be including screenshots of your wireframes. Which is usually a good idea. Employers will want to see wire frames so they can see that you know what you're doing when it comes to topology. It's going to do this and figure out the rest from here. Now, this is what I said. It's actually easier to retop over a head than just odd stuff like this because with a head, you know, there's some really basic rules. You basically need to know to make three loops and make sure that you've got the number of polygons right so they connect up evenly without too many triangles. Here, you know, there's no rules for re topoing something like there are rules, of course, you know, even topology, not stuff that's crazy and make it deform nicely, but there's not, like, you know, something that says, put a loop around here, put a loop around there. You have to figure it out yourself, which is why, um, which is why I think this is actually trickier. But I don't think it's really that hard to learn. I think you sort of get a pretty good understanding of where your loops are meant to go pretty fast. It's probably actually slightly easier now that we have higher poly counts we can work with. So your deformation isn't so dependent on your exact precise topology. Back when you could only do like 1015000, it's super important to get your loops in the perfect place and set up, you know, collapsing edge loops on the insides of joints. Now we don't really need to do that. And if you have enough topology in the area, then you can sort of fix things with the weight paints. And these days, you know, they have morph targets and everything for animation. But still you want your portfolio to look good and you want your Y frames and your portfolio to look good. Pay attention and make sure your loops make sense. Like I said, it's not super hard. You get a feel for it. Try until you get it right. Now, this stuff can be really frustrating to work on because it's so tiny and it's really out of the way, but you kind of need to do this if you want it to look good. Even if it's not super visible from far away, it's gonna be annoying. Even just knowing that you skipped over. And if you look at feet on characters in video games, they're usually really rough 'cause no one wants to go in spending time on this. Yeah, you can kind of skip through this and rush it. But, well, I'm teaching you how to do things, so I'm not allowed to do that, I guess. I have to do things properly. And Now, luckily, when you switch between selection modes, it keeps your previous selection. If you want to convert one of your selections to a different one, you hold Control while clicking the button and you can see it converted the edges to polygons. It just selected, you know, the polygons that have those edges as a part of them. I can also, you know, select a bunch of polygons and hold Control and have all their edges selected or control again and have all the edge selected. That's a good thing to know. Um So now I'm just trying to figure out how to fill in this gap between the toes, bridging across where it's this parts fairly obvious. It gets a little bit more confusing here where we have to blend parts in, but just bridging across and capping this area, I think this is a really neat looking solution. So that actually turned out to be pretty easy, in this case. Nice thing about this optimized thing is it always works the same regardless of your selection mode. So if you're going to try and target weld while you're in edge mode, what you're going to end up with is it wants to weld edges to each other, which isn't the same behavior as in vertex mode. So if you just click Optimize, it always behaves the same. So Shift and drag is always going to weld vertices, which is why I'll often click Optimize instead of, you know, clicking two to go into edge mode and then Target World. And then, you know, the shortcut to Target World. That's like two whole hot keys instead of just clicking something on the screen. It's a little bit faster, I think. So moving on to the gap between these two toes. Now, this is going to be a little bit trickier than what we did for the last two toes because we have more edges on the right than we do on the sorry, more edges on the left than we do on the right. So we're going to have to figure out a way to reduce those edges down that looks kind of neat. So here I just do the obvious, which is bridge those two planes because we do definitely want a polyloop going around each around the outside of each toe. So I do the parts that I know first, and then what I like to do is cap in the remaining hole and just start cutting up that resulting end go with the cut tool and seeing what I can do with that, just playing around with the topology and seeing where I can go from there. So the two cuts I did here are not ideal. This isn't quite neat enough for me yet. I end up playing with it a little bit more, and, you know, welding the vertex to one side, welding it to the other, and just seeing how it works, how I can make it turn out. And sometimes you need to sort of weld vertices further away from your exact problem area. Sometimes that can help to sort of work from a bigger distance, but, you know, you just have to play around and see what you can get to work. This is good, actually. I'm spending too much time thinking about it when it's really gonna be tiny. You know, we will do that because it's not changing the silhouette. So we'll do it like this. That's good. I spent way too much time over thinking, you know, sometimes you'll be really zoomed in working on this tiny piece, and then you zoom out and you realize, wait, it doesn't even matter. You shouldn't have spent that much time on it, which is, you know, exactly what I just did here. So it's time to wrap this chapter up. It's gotten a little bit too long. The next chapter is just going to pick up right where I'm leaving off here. And hopefully, this has given you a pretty good idea on how to start approaching more odd shaped objects like this. So see you in the next chapter. That's all for this one. 6. 05 Retopologising The Shoes Part2: Welcome to Chapter five. Now, just like Chapter three, most of this chapter does have sped up footage, and you can find the real time footage named Chapter five real time, just like Chapter three. And just to explain the way I edit these is most of it is live commentary recorded as I'm doing this retopo. What I do is I just cut out the dead air and also I add in some extra commentary where it's relevant, where I see something on screen that maybe I didn't explain in the moment. So I hope that clears things up a bit, and, you know, it's not confusing why sometimes I'm talking as if I'm doing it live, and then sometimes it sounds like I'm doing pre recorded commentary. That's why it's just sort of to make sure I'm getting across the maximum amount of useful relevant information. And, you know, I can speed up the footage this way and I can keep live commentary and I can also add extra commentary. I feel like this is the best of both worlds for you guys. But also, if you want to see me work in real time, that option is available. You just won't get any commentary because it's hard to make commentary for, you know, 8 hours of footage as opposed to just a couple hours. So I hope that helps. So here you can see me just checking if the cut tool cut correctly across the faces that I wanted to. Sometimes the cut tool can be a bit finicky because it's a screen space, so it basically cuts across what it can see. And if you're cutting across something that's obscured or something, it can mess up and cut across completely the wrong faces. So after you do a cut, sometimes it's a good idea to check if it came out right the way you wanted to, and it didn't go off to the side somewhere where you didn't expect it to. So I'm not gonna be having the toes string as a separate object. I'm going to be merging it into the whole low poly, having it be part of the same mesh and not a separate mesh. Toes and fingers, the bits between the fingers. They're always a bit of a headache if you're having to do them manually. And this is why it's good to not always use a base mesh because you can't use base mesh with, you know, the toes and fingers done already. But then you come to something like this where you're not going to be able to conform a base mesh onto the shoe. You're gonna have to do it manually, and if you've never done a hand before or a toe, then, you know, you're gonna be more confused than if you have done it before yourself. So that's why, you know, it's good to use base meshes when you know what you're doing and you're just being efficient. But, um, Uh, if you're doing it for the first time, you probably don't know what you're doing. Let's be realistic. Here I just extrude upwards. So remember, you can use the full modeling toolkit. When you're doing Retopo, don't just limit yourself to the conform tools. If it's more convenient to use an extrude instead of the extend tool in the free form tools panel, then just, you know, use an extrude. And similarly, if you need to get a vertex in position and the drag tool is snapping incorrectly and not where you want it, you can just move that vertex where you want it manually. Don't forget that's always an option. And, you know, if the snapping tools are being annoying, then just don't use them and do it freehand. Working between the toes or fingers or areas like that where it's sort of hard to see what you're doing. It's hard to move stuff around. It's a really tight spot. Those parts are always going to be a little bit annoying. So, you know, there's not really a way around it. You just sort of have to deal with it. Also, remember to turn off edge constraints if you're using a conform tool. You can see my conform tool is going crazy there, and it's because it's trying to conform to the edges while conforming. So make sure to turn off constraints if you're going to use. Another quick hint is to not move your camera around too much while you're actually cutting with the cut tool because it can mess up and cut a completely different face to the one you want to. Now, in this case, it works fine. I couldn't show a case it going wrong in this exact instance. Another thing to remember is sometimes undo doesn't properly undo your cuts, so you need to undo and watch the facets of the face that you cut to make sure they've gone back to normal to know that you've undone enough times to get it working. I'm thinking about whether to model this completely separate and just sticking out from there or if to just model across and bake over this gap. And I'm trying to think. Now, this is quite a significant gap, maybe like a couple of years ago when models were lower resolution, you would bake this in and not model this separately. But I think now this might cast an interesting shadow it might be worth modeling separately. So I think that's what I'm gonna do. So here you can see me going through the little to square mesh that was imported at its lowest subdivision level from Zbrush, and I'm just going through and cleaning it up and getting rid of all the extra loops that I don't need in the actual low poly. Same thing we did with the soles of the shoe. So control backspace to get rid of edges I don't need or welding them where I don't need them. And I get rid of the cap that's clipping into the rest of the shoe like this end part. And I also get rid of the bevel on the bottom side of this mesh because it's not going to be visible from underneath. That part's completely obscured by the actual shoe, so we don't need that. So yeah, always make sure you're getting rid of detail in areas that are completely not going to be visible. Here I'm just cleaning up some engons. Now, engons are just faces with more than four sides, and they're really not that much of an issue. You can leave them in. The only problem they might make is that they can triangulate oddly. Now, sometimes you'll even want to triangulate stuff manually on a quad face if it's triangulating in a direction that doesn't look right. This is not really a good place for an example here. But let me see if there is actually. Now, this is something you would do more with lower polymodels where this is a lot more visible. Here, this isn't really visible, but if you have a polygon that's triangulating really badly, and you can see this in faceted mode more easily, but you'll see it in other modes too. There is a ton triangulation button that will flip the way each polygon triangulates. Now, I don't go through and triangulate everything. This is just purely for where you have a really big problem area. That looks really wrong. Here there weren't any. I was just showing it as an example. So you can do that. Okay. I'm going to add another edit poly before moving on just in case. And let's just save as well. We're just going to be putting in these big loops again and then connecting them up and refining them just like you saw me do with the head and with the start of the boot. Right here, I just took a look at the straps just to see what I'm going to do with them and how I'm going to align my topology to accommodate for those straps. The conform tool doesn't do a great job within two sided meshes, and one way you can deal with that is to select those vertices and pull them above the surface of that mesh, and then conforming down works a little bit better than if those vertices are stuck below that mesh. Another thing you can do is use the drag tool for individual vertices, and that one always seems to snap to the surface correctly. Another thing to note is that none of the conform tools work well if your vertices aren't close to the high poly, and this is dependent on camera angles. So what needs to happen is your vertices need to appear in front of the high poly visually. So what you can do is either move them into position manually with the transform tools or move your camera so those vertices appear in front of the high poly. What we might do for here where we have thickness is I'm going to split this top part off to a separate object and apply a shell modifier, so we don't have to do this part manually. What you can do is select along a path if you hold Shift and drag and then left click again to confirm it. So this can be a little bit tricky to get the hang on. But you press Shift, then you click and drag. And then you click again. Because if you don't click again, then the selection will disappear. So shift, drag, and click. Now, I think the move tool does go through to the other side of objects. Maybe having backface culling on helps with that. Yeah, it does. But, you know, you will still grab stuff through here. Actually, no, I don't think optional culling does help. It's just that, if I go into isolate mode, I was grabbing these like this, I won't the move tool doesn't move through the whole object. It only moves in a radius around what your curse is touching. Yeah. So don't worry about that. That's just me being silly. If you do feel like you've pressed and pulled with the move tool, but nothing has happened, probably just want to quickly undo because chances are you've grabbed something over here. So that's just something to get used to because otherwise, you'll be doing a bunch of work, and suddenly you look around and everything here is ruined. And after you do that a few times, you get a feel for noticing when you've clicked and nothing's happened, and that probably means you've clicked on something you can't see. And as soon as I feel like I've done that, I undo just in case I drag out these extra little squares just so when I press control and shift to drag a whole loop, it doesn't bring this whole loop because I don't need the whole loop anymore. And now looking at this, sometimes you retopo belts like this separately and even use, like, a tiling UV texture on them. In this case, I'm not going to be doing that because I mean, they're not they don't drift off from the surface a lot, apart from this one bit, which will be fine to do separately. And there's not enough of them here to justify tying texture. And we'll probably want a lot not a lot because the texturing for this model will be clean. We're not going to do a really dirty model, but when you use a tiling texture and you split something off, then when you're texturing, it's harder to make things blend in and look cohesive. So here we're gonna be, you know, merging this into the surface of the low poly. But on some of the shoulder belts, once I get to those, I'll have a think and they might be separate. I'm gonna see if, see how the pants fit into this to see exactly how we're gonna handle this inner part. So let me find the pants. Okay, so it looks like we do need to do this hole loop, and we might have to get creative with that hole there since things don't quite line up. Now, this happens all the time when I'm modeling, too. You're not gonna think everything ahead. And you're gonna end up with a little gap like this. It's something to keep in mind when you're doing your high poly. But also sometimes you're gonna forget. And in this case, you could go back to Zbrush and fix it. But also, I could just cap this hole because it's basically never going to be this so I'm just going to cap that off there. And when I'm texturing, just set it to a dark material and give it some ambient occlusion, as well. And it'll it'll look fine. So here I just detach that top flap part of the shoe so we can shed it later. And I put it into translucent mode so we can still sort of see where it is while we continue working on modeling the lower part of the boot. Now I'm just thinking about if this shoit looks good on this tiny tab. It's quite a small piece. But I think I might add an extra polygon here, a little loop to make it a sort of hexagon, if that makes sense. Just because it sticks out so much that its silhouet is really obvious. And that's one of the main things. We're looking to make nice when it comes to the low poly. A Let's see how this looks. Now you can see, instead of just looking like a weird sharp square this reads as kind of round from here. So B. B. So moving on to topologizing these buckles. Now, I'm not going to merge these into the surface of the boot. Firstly, because they're hard surface, and hard surface things tend to look a little bit better when they're separate. And then, secondly, because there's at least four of them that are identical, two pairs, you know, for each boot, it makes sense to copy them over so we don't have to do the UVs for them each time. And also we might even be able to share UVs for them. So they all just use the same exactly UV texture for all four of them, and that would save texture space. I'm not sure on that yet, because it can be nice to have more color variation and dust variation, but on a more cleanly textured model like this, that might not be necessary, but we'll think about that once we get to UV wrapping. Right now, I'm going to retpper one of these and then we'll copy it over to where the other one is. So we're going to be adding a chamfer to all of these corners. So now I'm just moving the corners into the right position for the chamfer. Since the shafA basically cuts that corner off, the corners sort of need to extend beyond where the high poly ends in order to get the desired result. So now I'm just selecting all of these edges. And once they're selected, I'll apply a hamper, which you can find in the Edit edges panel. And click that little expand button to get the full menu and turn segments down to zero, so we don't have any extra segments to deal with. Now, of course, there are a few triangles leftover, that's not a big deal. I want to bring these inner corners in, and you can find loop tools under that drop down menu to pull different loops in towards each other slightly or push them outwards. And it's a pretty hidden panel, but it can be really useful when you're working with hampers or just edges that are close to each other. So this is a pretty typical workflow for re topologizing objects that have been modeled in a subdivision workflow, which is when you model the lowest subdivision level and then apply a subdivision modifier to achieve your final high poly. And you can do this workflow in pretty much every three software from three SMAX to, you know, Maya blender or Zebra even. And all we're really doing is removing supporting loops which were used for the low poly that we don't need that aren't altering the silhouette. And we're adding in extra geometry where we do need it for the silhouette. So, you know, it's just a bunch of control backspace to get rid of loops and target welding to get weld up edges we don't need, and then a bunch of cut tool to cut in extra edges. Or like what I did for the corners, a bunch of chamfering. Mm. I So you may have noticed that the shading on these models has gotten kind of messed up as I'm working on them. And that sometimes happens when you're working in Edit Poly. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's something to be aware of. It doesn't really mean that there's anything wrong with your model. Now, sometimes you get shading issues when you have two vertices really close to each other and you just need to weld them. But in this case, that wasn't the issue, and the fix for that is to apply an edit normals modifier and click the Unify button. And before you click that button, you need to select all of the normals. So drag select across all of the lines sticking out from the mesh when you turn on that it normals modifier and click Unify. And that should fix everything. I don't think I've ever had issues where it hasn't worked. Sometimes another thing that fixes that issue is if you add an edit polymodifier and collapse to it, but that one doesn't always work. But the edit normals modifier, definitely will fix your issue. So we're coming to the end of this chapter, and like I said, at the start, you can find the non sped up footage of this one named Chapter five real time or something like that. You can also, if you're using VLC, I'm pretty sure you can slow down the playback speed. So most of the footage here is at three times speed. So I'm sure if you play it back at half speed, then should be able to follow along easily. That's all for Chapter five. See you in the next one. Okay. 7. 06 Retopo The Shoes Part3 (Aligning Instanced Low Polies): Welcome to Chapter six. Now we are going to continue along with the retopo. A lot of this is going to be the same stuff you already saw. But one new thing I am going to walk you through is how to align your newly retpoed part to other duplicates of the same part that you imported as a high poly, which is a little bit tricky. There's no one click solution for this. I turned on selecting plates. That's on the top tool bar towards the left. And what that does, it aligns the pivot z axis to the surface of the mesh you're dragging the pivot point on. This isn't essential, but it can be useful for aligning pivot points or objects to faces. Then I turn select and place off and I turn on vertex snapping, so I can align that aligned pivot point to a vertex. You'll need to do some manual adjustment just to get it perfect. So what I'm aiming for is the Z axis to be coming off perpendicular to the surface, and then aligning the other axes to edges that intersect with that vertex. So here I'm aligning the Y axis to that short edge and the X axis to the long edge. We've got our pivot point in position. What we can do is go ahead with duplicating and getting this low polly in the right place on the other side. So first thing we're going to do is make an instance of the low poly, not a copy, which is what I did by accident, but I'll show you how to fix that. And now we're mirroring it. Make sure you get it mirrored on the right axis. Flick through all the options till you see which one's right. And we select in place to get it into the right position. And all I'm thinking about now is getting that corner in the right spot. I'm not worrying about rotation or anything else. All I want to do is make sure that the corner on the low poly and the high poly is perfectly aligned. And from then on, we can rotate the other axes, and it's actually fairly simple to get it aligned in all the other directions once you have that single point in the right place. So you can see it takes me maybe a minute or so to get this in the right position. You need to, you know, rotate it a few times and maybe transform it in general a little bit. So this is a bit annoying to do. But as far as I know, there's no better way to do this when you don't have an individual pivot point for each high poly object, which is what happens when you import from Zbrush. What I'm going to quickly show you now is a workflow I found that works when you want to place dozens or hundreds of the same object, and you want to have both the low poly and the high poly of those objects. So what I do is I make the high poly and the low poly and then I attach the low poly to the high poly so they're one object. And then we can take this combined low poly and high poly and make instances of it and you place those instances where you need to. In this case, I'm just putting them all in a line, but, you know, you'd put them where you need them. And then you make a copy of these instances, not an instance of the instances, but a copy. And those copies will be a separate set of instances from the original instance. And that's so you can later split them off. So you can delete the low poly on one set of instances and the high poly on the other set of instances, and then you'll have separate low polys and high polys. Another thing you can do is select either the high or low poly and click High selected. If you just want to see, for example, the high poly or the low poly, you don't want the low poly clipping through the high poly, and that will propagate across all of the instances. So that's another handy thing. And, you know, that's the great thing about instances. What you do on one of them will copy across to all of them. And this is something I've used in projects where I need to place like hundreds of the same objects like scale mail and stuff like that. So now I'm just really double checking and making some really fine adjustments to the positioning of the low poly. And another thing you'll want to make sure is to have your transform mode set to local and not viewport. That's up on it's a little drop down menu up on the top tool bar just under graph editors. Now, moving on to these clips, it's going to be the exact same process, so I don't think I'll be commenting on it that much. And I just decided to leave that crash message in there just to let you guys know that, you know, TS Max likes to crash randomly. All of these softwares do. I don't think there's a single three E package that is really so stable that you'll never see it crash outright when you're doing something even really basic. So, if you do occasionally get a crash, just know that it's probably nothing you did. Sometimes it is something you're doing like if your file is way too big or you've got something weird going on in the file. But most of the time, it's just random. So yeah, don't worry about stuff like that. So, yeah, you can see I'm following the exact same thing I did on the first little buckle thing. Just put the pivot on the corner, align that corner, and then align everything else from there. Not much more to say on that, so I'll just let this part play through for you guys. No. At this point, I realized that I made copies instead of instances. So here's how you fix that. All you need to do is make an instance, mirror it, and then align it to the copy you made by accident. So it's really just as simple as doing two things, mirroring it. Oh, you only need to mirror if your copies are mirrored, of course. If they're not, then you don't need to mirror. But if they are mirrored, then you just mirror it, and then you use the align tool and align transforms and rotations, and you align to pivot point. And that's all you need to do for that. Now we've got our buckles done and duplicated, and that whole hassle is over, and we can just move back to the regular old topology work we were doing before. So this is all the same stuff moving around vertices and adding more geometry where you need it. Pretty straightforward. I think I went through this in the last two episodes, so you should be pretty familiar with this part. Nice little trick here is you can clone parts of your mesh that are really similar in two places like this little end of this strap. There's one that's basically the same on the other side. So using Control Shift and drag, you can clone that part of the mesh, and then because it's mirrored on the other side, I used mirror and just move it into the rough position, and then you can finish up with the drag tool, or if it's different shape, you can use the conform tool. So here I'm just welding it into position. And there's a few other things I need to adjust before I do that, just to get the topology the same as it was on the other side. But this saves you, you know, a couple of minutes of work that you would otherwise have to do twice. So just control shift to drag off an element to, you know, duplicate an element. And then if you need to, you can mirror it. Sometimes mirroring will mess up the vertex normals. So you might need to apply and edit normals to fix those later or select those faces and click flip. On the top tool bar. So I've got all the topo in place now, and it's just a matter of welding the points into the right place, using edge welding instead of tx welding. You can vertex weld, as well, of course. It doesn't matter. Edge welding can save some time because he weld two vertices at once instead of each vertex individually. And I'm just using the drag tool to put all of the vertexes into the right place because, you know, it's well, firstly, we didn't get it in exactly I didn't get it in the exact position it's meant to be because I just did it freehand. And also, this mesh is slightly different shape to the one on the other side, anyway. So while you might have to do some I mean, it depends on the use case, what mesh you're working on. But, you know, sometimes this won't save you from having to conform everything and align all the vertices, but it will save you the headache of, you know, figuring out where to put the topology and stuff like that and cutting in all the edge loops and all that stuff. So I didn't have to do any of that. I did have to align the vertices, but that's a lot easier, and it's a lot less thinking than having to extrude and cut and all of those sorts of things. So, yeah, this is all stuff you've seen before adding loop cuts and whatnot, wherever you need. And then, using edge constraints if you need to move an edge along ano edge, stuff like that. Doing a quick little extrusion here to get that shape. And when you extrude, you need to remember to delete those extra faces you don't need. And to quickly fill in holes, you can use the CAP function as long as you are in hole selection mode, or I'm not exactly sure what that selection mode is called, but it's the one after edge selection, and the shortcut for it is three. And, you know, just dragging stuff into position, adding cuts, cleaning the topo up all the same stuff. So this is, you know, that's what re topo is. It's a fairly monotonous task, and a lot of it is pretty semi, but it's something that has to be done. Here I'm just detaching the left side of the high poly because it keeps getting in the way of my view when I'm working on the left side of this shoe. You know, I just gets in your face. So I just attached it and hid it. At this point, I realized that I had the tongue of the shoe detached on the high poly, and that's why things were snapping wrong for me. So I just went back to the high poly and attached it. Now, I'm pretty sure that part is called the tongue on a shoe. I'm not sure if that's commonly known, like, word or part of a shoe, but you end up learning a lot of these kind of esoteric names for things when you're working on three D, just to be able to name a specific part of the objects you're working on or to find references. So these belts are modeled into the low poly, just like all the other ones on the shoe. So it just takes a couple extra cuts to be able to sort of conform this on. And I have to weld these edges together. Now, you can see that the weld tool doesn't automatically update in the viewport every time you weld something. That doesn't mean it hasn't welded. It just means you have to, you know, exit the weld tool or do a different operation to get it to update in the viewport. And here you can see, I've sort of if you want to have a part that's modeled in kind of look detached, if you add in that little bit of an undercut underneath it, it tends to look pretty convincing when it's detached. And also, remember, there's a buckle around this whole part. So, this part isn't really even going to be that visible. So there's no reason to worry about modeling the inner part of the loop or modeling underneath this loop where it's sort of still kind of above the surface of the shoe. No reason to worry about that too much because there's going to be a buckle obscuring all of that. And I basically do the same thing on the right side of the shoe as well, so there's not really much to explain here. Here I'm filling out that hole and sort of slotting out this awkward space that's around where that tongue is starting to leave the surface of the shoe and also there's a buckle in there. So yeah, you'll always have these sort of slightly awkward spaces where you're not sure how far in to model something or, you know, how to sort of fill in that area. And it's sort of you need to know that you don't need to follow the surface super closely because normal maps sort of bake down fairly well areas like this. And another thing to keep in mind is that you'll always be able to go back and slightly adjust these areas once you do a test bake and you see how it goes. Of course, before we get to test baking, we'll also need to UV unwrap. But I think once you do areas like this a few times, you sort of get a feel for what you can get away with. But until you get that sort of feel, just go through this process a few times and do a few test bakes, and I think it comes quite quickly. Of course, also, you know, you can sort of follow my lead. What I'm doing here is basically what you want to do, as well. So I'm just doing the same thing I did on the right side over here, basically. And the next few minutes of this chapter is basically all of this kind of stuff. So I think it's fairly self explanatory. I'm just, if there's something really out of place, I'll move it. But right now I'm going through and sort of closing up some holes and adding in a few extra cuts where I need them. Do so right now I am detaching the tongue of the boot again because we're going to work on the tongue low poly, and I want to be able to snap to it and sort of reach some areas that are obscured by the other parts of the high poly. To do the inner side of this tongue, I'm just using the shell modifier and making sure I'm shelling internally and getting the shell in approximately the right thickness. I want it a little bit thicker so that the conformed to, you know, I don't have I can see where all the vertices are when I want to conform them, so they're not stuck underneath the surface. So yeah, make it like a tiny bit thicker than you actually need it. And here along the rounded edges, obviously, you need a few more extra cuts and all that. And a way to do that is, you know, to just just add in those little triangles around the corners or the edge and not actually put loops through the whole mesh because that would be wasteful. So now I'm getting around to the inner side of the tongue and, you know, a quick conform just to get it roughly on top of the surface. And also, what I'm going to do is I'm going to weld some of these verts up because we don't need as much topology on the inner side as we do the outer side, because it's obviously a lot less visible. But we can't get rid of too much either because it might start clipping through to the other side, which is something we want to avoid because this is quite a thin mesh. So if we really lower the topology on the inner side way too much, then we'll have issues with clipping. You saw there, I use the conforming drag tool for a second, and ended up dragging the front side as well. So with these fin meshes, you need to avoid that kind of stuff. And about this much, you know, this much of a reduction is pretty much all you can really do without starting to clip on a thin. And I just made sure to delete the bottom side of the tongue right there, so I can weld it to the rest of the low poly right now, I'm trying to extend the bottom of the tongue mesh I have here just so I can fill in that little gap and to do that and stop the whole loop from extending downwards. I extended two individual polygons on either side of the tongue, and that's a little trick on how to stop, like, things that apply to an entire polyloop from applying to the entire polylop. You add in, like, an extra face to stop that from happening. So right now I'm extending around and, you know, trying to fill out the remaining empty spaces on the high poly that I need to, you know, still retop of. And these areas can be pretty tricky, especially when you have an object that is, you know, it's going from a separate sort of free hanging object into something that you're trying to combine into one object on the low poly. And these areas can be a little bit tricky. It's hard to decide, like how far down to go to where you want to merge them at which point. And, you know, how close you need to be. I thought here was a pretty good point where it sort of bends forward. That little area seems like the ideal point to, you know, have tongue B three hanging. Now I've attached the tongue mesh that was separate back to the rest of the low poly and I'm just welding everything together. So this part is straightforward. And you can use Target Weld, and in places where you have three verts really close to each other, you can just weld them with the regular weld button that welds by distance. And, um yeah, that's all there is to it in this area. So here I'm going to do the rim of the shoe, and that can be basically impossible to do with the extend and the conform tools. So what you can do is just select that edge and scale inwards while holding Shift, and that'll extrude inwards. And, you know, you can scale it in both directions to get it as close as you need and then do the final pass with the drag tool or whichever tool you want to use. So I'm going to spend, you know, a few minutes cleaning up this edge and, you know, maybe adding in a cut here where I need one. And once I'm satisfied that the edge is in more or less the right place, I'll go ahead and cap that whole area off. And then bevel it downwards. Now I'm using bevel instead of extrude, just so I can scale it inwards and avoid having to pull these vertices in through the exterior of the mesh because this hole sort of gets narrower as it goes down, and that would be annoying. So, you know, you can use bevel instead of that. And Bevel does the exact same thing as extrude. So if you don't apply any values to it, you know, you can just use it instead of extrude. There's really no reason for those two tools to be separate. Now, I'm just trying to figure out how deep I need to make this hole because we won't be modeling the entire interior of the shoe, just about as low down as we need to for it to no longer be visible. And then we'll just, you know, leave a cap. And I'm also reducing the number of vertices I have going on here because the lower down we go, the less visible they are and the less we need them. But again, same thing as with the tongue on the shoe, you can't get rid of too many because you might start getting some clipping is shoes. I'm just also shifting stuff around to make it a little bit more even because, of course, this edge is very uneven. The back goes up really high, so the edges around the back need to go down a little bit lower than the ones in the front. In fact, I'm going to add this little extra section just so we can bring the back of this hole down a little bit deeper. And that should be good enough. And then from here, I think I can just collapse the verts inwards on this part. You'll notice here that I had some trouble selecting those vertices on my inset, and that's because they were hidden using the panel in the top tool bar on the right, you know, the hide selected hide unselected that tool panel. So you need to if for some reason, your vertices aren't appearing, then it's probably because they're hidden. So you just need to, you know, click Unhide all, and they should reappear. Now I'm going to go about doing this loop. And the way I decide to do it is to take the low poly I imported from Zbrush and just detach the part that I need, which is only this little loop at the top here and, you know, add in a few quick loop cuts where I needed them and use the free form tools to align it exactly to my actual high poly and then, you know, attaching it and bridging it into the rest of the low poly topology. So it's pretty straightforward. And yeah, remember to always make sure to keep an eye out for parts you can use either from your low subdivision level from the high poly or whatever it is that can save you some time doing work. So because this whole, sort of, what would you call this scrap or yeah, I guess it's a strap, because it's very close to the surface, I'm just modeling it in and just with a simple extrude operation. A Now, over here, I'm adding in some cuts close to the actual loop. And these are mainly so I can get rid of that gon, where the loop connects here. And if I was to connect to the closest loop that was already there before I added those extra cuts, it would have been a really long and thin, tiny triangle, which isn't ideal. You usually want your triangles to not be super thin. So that's why I added that extra cut there. So we're coming towards the end of this chapter. All I'm doing here is adding extra geometry to support these curves around the heel. Now, you could just as easily bake these sort of indents down into the surface. You don't need to model them in when you're doing a low poly. And you wouldn't be modeling them in on a lower polymodel. But because this is AA and I'm aiming for a high fidelity here. That's why I'm modeling them in. I won't make a huge impact, but it will have a slight effect where the sort of indent the edges of it will overlap, and there will be a small visual impact and also maybe shadows might be a little bit cooler, especially if you're doing it traced. Now, I mean, it depends on how close up you're going. But yeah, if you're doing high fidelity A stuff, this is the kind of stuff you sort of need to do sometimes, but not always. So it depends on your case. And right here, that's another trick. I mean, it's the same as I did for the scrap earlier. If there's a part you already re topoed and it's good, just shift control, duplicate it, and move it roughly into the place it needs to be, and then you don't have to think about doing that topology all over again. You just have to move the vertices into the right spots. Okay, so that's it for Chapter six. As always, you can find the real time version of this video. I'll be named Chapter six realtime. Chapter seven is just going to be refining and finishing up the shoes, and they'll be completely done by the end of Chapter seven, and we'll be able to move on to something else. Thanks for watching. 8. 07 Retopologising The Shoes: Welcome to Chapter seven. We're going to continue working on the boot. We're actually just going to be finishing it up now. So all of the major work is done. It's just a few more tweaks left to do, you know, make sure everything is finalized and perfectly in place, and this is going to be the last episode covering the shoe. So we're finally going to have it done. So once again, I'm copy pasting a part I've already done, so I don't have to rethink all of the topology. I just have to make sure it's in the right position. I don't have to make the decisions on where to put the loops and stuff. So what's going on on screen is pretty straightforward. So instead, I'll just give you a little bit of general information that I think is helpful. Really common question is poly coount and how many polygons to make your character model. Probably one of the most common questions you get. And the usual answer you get is, it depends. And while it's true, it's not really helpful, is it? And also often you'll get really lowball numbers like 30,000, 50,000. And yeah, that's what the numbers were like, you know, ten years ago, or even more. So sometimes info you can find online isn't great on this subject. What I say is just find a game of which, you know, the fidelity is something you want to match, and just copy that. You can find info on the polygons of characters in games. It can be a little bit tricky to find, but it's definitely out there. If you search for, you know, the game title and then character Polycount, you can probably find some information. Another thing you can do is look for model Rips. So if you type in the game character's name plus model RIP, there's a lot of them on Deviant Art for some reason. I guess there's some sort of community of model rippers on there. But yeah, you can find that info, and that's a good starting point where you don't really have to think about stuff. You can take a look at, you know, the final polycon on those characters and just copy that. And also take a look at what polygon density looks like, and, you know, that gives you a good idea of what to do. And really, it's the polygon density that is the important part because the final number, you know, if it's a more complex character, it'll have a bigger number of triangles used on it. If it's one wearing a simple outfit, then it won't have a lot of triangles. Of course, keep in mind that all ripped models will have triangulated polygons, so it will be tricky to see the poly flow. But yeah, that's a good source on, like, how to find out how many polygons do you use on your characters. But since you already have this tutorial here, you can just follow my lead and, you know, look at what I'm doing instead of having to go and search around for info online. So again, I'm just selecting and duplicating a part of the mesh so I can mirror it and apply it to the other side. And I'm doing a lot in this area because it's almost completely symmetrical mesh. It's a little bit off, it's squished to one direction. So it's not completely symmetrical, so, you know, using symmetry on this part isn't really going to work, but taking pieces of it and mirroring them works fine. And it's actually really tricky, at least for me. Maybe other people are better at it to mirror topology in your head, copy it to the other side identically. I don't know, it can get confusing trying to, you know, uh, mirror what you did on one side manually. I mean, of course, it's easy to just click the mirror button. But if you're trying to, like, you know, flip everything over in your head and apply those same cuts and same topology to the other side, that can be kind of tricky, and there's no reason to do it. Just take that part, shift control, drag it, and, you know, I've been through this like five times, I think, but it's a neat trick. Here, you can see me flash the Snip and Sketch tool up on screen, as well. That's another useful thing you can do. You can take a little screenshot of an area you want and, you know, then use it to sort of compare or as a guide if you want to, you know, if you want to have a little reference up on screen of, like, what you did in an earlier area. And also, I think, like I showed before, you can also sketch over it and draw plan out your topology if you want to. Something else you can see going on on screen here is the vertex nulls are really messed up. There's like black chunks of the mesh going on here, and that is a result of me mirroring those parts of the topology when I copied them over. And yeah, that's something that happens. The vertex nulls become inverted if you mirror them. And it's an easy fix. You can either, select those faces and flip them or use the Edit normals tool, the Edit normals modifier and unify all the normals and that'll fix it, too. But here, because I'm working with the wireframe or the cage view, those faces aren't really visible to me, so I don't really care. And instead of, you know, stopping everything to fix those faces, I'm just continuing work. And I'll fix them later on. So, you know, bear with the fact that the mesh is kind of ugly for now, but I find it easier to focus on one task at a time instead of, you know, switching back and forth. So, you know, I just leave them like that until I go back and fix everything at once. The next few minutes are just a little bit of, you know, cleaning up the vertices and shifting stuff around a tiny bit. Honestly, I don't really have anything much to say on that. So I think this will just be a little bit of a time lapse until I see something worth commenting on again. I'm zooming out now and taking a look at the low poly in its entirety just to see if anything jumps out at me that I feel like is wrong. I'm also doing a quick fix on the smoothing groups. So just going down to the smoothing groups panel and clicking Autos move. You can also adjust the angle at which Autos move applies, like a different smoothing group with that little spinner on the bottom. This is just a quick fix for smoothing groups. These won't be our final ones. We'll do that once we get around to UV unwrapping, because smoothing groups are dependent on the UV seams. You kind of want to put the smoothing groups where the UV seams are. This is just to make the model a little bit easier to look at, just so you can see what's going on without seeing a bunch of facets and also without seeing a bunch of normals that are kind of messed up from everything being too smooth. So this is just a quick fix to make it look close to the final result. A So The Mm I'm going to start working on these folds now, and this is a nice little introduction to folds before we get into the bulk of it, which is going to be on the body, where there's going to be a bunch of fold retpper we're going to have to be doing. So the basic logic behind how I retper folds is once I have that initial grid that, you know, flat grid laid in over that area, the way I handle folds is I just cut and add to the topology. And as long as you're only adding to the topology, that won't really affect the way that mesh deforms. If you start welding and subtracting from it, then that affects deformation a little bit more. So what I do is I cut in the crest of the fold and the valley of the fold and conform those. And then from there, you know, you might need, like, some extra edges around the crest to make it not look so sharp and stuff like that. But it's pretty straightforward, really. The thing you should sort of keep in mind is that it is going to look a little bit messier than, you know, just the flat grid. And you don't really need to worry about making it look really neat if you're going to be removing a bunch of vertices to achieve that. Because once you start removing vertices, then you might start messing with deformation and it might not deform as well. So, you know, even if it looks a little bit messier than a flat area, it's kind of okay because folds are messy, so it's not something to worry about. Now you can see I've moved on to this sort of flap area where we've got that overlapping, you know, tongue and the underlying part of the boot. But it's not overlapping very closely, so there's a little bit of a gap, and we need to represent that in the low polyly. And it's a question of how far underneath do you go? Because you don't want to go all the way underneath because that's never going to be visible. So you sort of have to, you know, move your camera around and see how far is the most commonly viewed angle because the bake it will bake that area down quite well. You do have a little bit of leeway in areas like this. You don't have to worry about pulling in super close to the surface. So you just sort of have to push inwards enough to make it look like an overhang, and so it's not blatantly visible that it doesn't go all the way through. You can see here I add an extra sort of edge to square up that pointy part, and that's kind of what you want to do because really pointy sections on these folds do become quite visible and kind of jarring, in my opinion. So generally, most of the time on, like, any bigger fold, I will have the crest of it be flat, you know, have two edges going over the crest instead of just one pointy edge. And I find that works a lot better than having like a single point. I, I like that So So you can see I'm adding quite a few vertical loops across the boot, and we don't actually need that many. The issue is, we need a few extra on the belt at the top, and we also need some on the curvature of that rim of the heel. And it doesn't really make sense to weld that loop down just for the body where there's two vertices because then you have a triangular on top and on bottom and it's a little bit unnecessary to do that extra welding just to save two triangles. So that's why I've left in all of these loops that go vertically across the body of the boot. They're a little bit excessive. We don't need that many, but also welding them down is unnecessary just because of, you know, how few polygons you're actually going to save. Like, what's the point of really doing that? And then, you know, you have this messy looking topology. I'd rather keep things neater, even though they're, like, a tiny bit more wasteful in terms of triangle count. You know, in this case, it didn't really make sense to me to weld those edges down just for those two vertices in the middle. So when it comes to these belts going vertically, you know, along in this area, you can see they start off really close to the surface, which is why I decided to model them into this slow polly. But then they sort of move off above the surface, and there's a little bit of a gap. And it's not such a big gap that I would want to model this separately, but the gap is there, and it's quite visible unless we move some of those the vertices underneath the belt. So that's a little trick for areas like this is, you know, move them in a little bit, just like you can see here, where it'll only be visible if you're looking at it, you know, head on from that side. And even in that case, because it'll probably be in shadow in basically all lighting conditions and also we have a lot of ambient occlusion in that area. And we'll probably have the base color also be quite dark in that area where it's in shadow. It basically won't look wrong. I'll look fine in basically every camera angle. So don't worry about that, just leave that sort of, you know, overhang, and that should look fine for those sorts of areas. And you can see me use this in several areas where there's, like, a sort of overhang, but it's not so much that you would want to model the whole thing through. So we're coming up to the end of topo for this boot. I think it's been a pretty good showcase of all the different techniques that we're going to be using a lot more of for the rest of the character. There was a little bit of hard surface stuff. There's, like, toes, which are quite similar to fingers. There's fabric and, you know, layered fabric and all sorts of, like, parts that are hanging off, but, you know, you have to make a decision of whether to have them in the same mesh or as a separate mesh or all sorts of stuff like that. So I think this is a good primer on all the other stuff we're going to do. Now, re topo is kind of a bit of a monotonous task. So hopefully this hasn't been too boring. I've tried my best to include as much commentary as I can. Now the tools here are quite straightforward. It's just like the CAD tool and the conform tools. It's pretty basic and there's not too much to say there. What matters more when it comes to retopo is the four process and the decisions you make where to put your topology and stuff like that. Hopefully, that's come across quite well both in my comentary and in the video. So we are pretty much done with the boot here. We might come back to it a little bit once we do unwrapping and baking if something is not quite working out in those areas. So remember that your low poly isn't done until you've basically baked or even textured sometimes, you might there's always a chance that you'll be coming back to it. So, you know, don't fret over it too much in that regard. Okay, that's the end of Chapter seven. In Chapter eight, we will be working on the pants. Remember, you can always check out the real time non sped up video if something was going too fast for you here. Uh, so that's all for this one. See you in Chapter eight. 9. 08 Retopologising The Legs: Welcome to Chapter eight. Now that we're done with the shoe, in this chapter, we'll be working on the pants. So let's unhide our high poly. And first things first, I'd like to think about wherever I'm going to merge this down into the same mesh as pants or leave it separate. I'm going to take a look at the whole hi poly, so I can decide. Now, if this part, this square of fabric was free hanging and it could flap around, then maybe I would retopo it separately. But here, it's most of the time it's covered. It wouldn't you wouldn't be having any cloth physics or, you know, animating it apart from down here. So yeah, does sort of leave a bit of a question on whether it's worth re topoing this part separately or not. Now, if you ever notice that your top toolbar is empty and you're wondering why none of those tools show up, that's because they're only available in Edit polymode not Edit mesh. So I'm just hiding the other parts, so I can take a look at this from both sides. Now, I'm really not sure, but we still need to get all the base loops in first before we even think about this part. What I'm going to do is detach it just so it's a little bit easier to get those base loops in. And then once we get to this part, then we'll think about it some more. Let me name it correctly so I know how to find it. And retopping the pants is going to go quite a lot like retpping a head. It's not as open to interpretation as we did for those boots. We need to there are some essential loops we need to get around this area. So we're going to be able to work at a lower subdivision level and then subdivide it for our final topology, which should make this go a little bit faster than what we had to do for the boots. So what we basically want to have is a loop going vertically here, then another one this way, and we sort of need to because these loops sort of you know, figure out a way to go across from vertical to horizontal. So that involves a couple poles in this area, so we can spread those extra loops out. And then it's really simple cylinder. Now, knees before when we had to work with less polygons, knees would be a lot more complex. But these days, in most games, if you look at rip models or rip models yourself from games, you'll see that for knees, they just go straight down because there's enough resolution in the topology now that You don't really need to think about collapsing the inside of the knee. Especially in this case, when we've got a bunch of folds, you can't really do that anyway. That part's going to be a lot simpler. So I'm going to stop talking about general stuff and actually start working. Now, instead of making a plane, you can actually go down here and create a new object and it'll make an empty object with nothing in it. And let me hide all of these meshes. I'll move this into the retper folder and get rid of my empty layers. And I'll move this over into my retoper folder as well. Just gonna do a little bit of cleanup here with the names. Okay, let's add that symmetry modifier. Okay, now we put in the first vertical loop that goes down this way. And sort of what I'm doing is I'm keeping in mind that this is about a quarter of the end density of quads I'm going to have. So I'm going to be subdividing twice. So I'm just keeping it really low poly while I get the poly flow in. I'm going to detach half of this leg so it stops getting in the way. And we want there to be the same number of loops on this side as there are in the front. No, I can get Bessie here where everything sort of, you know, there's not a lot of space down here, but you kind of do need the density here because this is probably one of the areas on the body with the most stretching. And we have another loop going like this, y I'm just going to move this down a bit. So we have space for the third loop. We'll probably have to move this up in a bit, but right now I want space. Now, the problem with the step build tool is that, yeah, it can be tough to get it to build in the direction you want. Sometimes you sort of have to go off to the side. This isn't quite in the correct place. I'm going to move it up in a little bit. But we sort of want to have a diagonal loop to help us transition from, like, this vertical direction down to this horizontal one. Okay. Now, these are basically the main loops we need. So let's figure out how to connect them up. We don't really need the high poly for this part. Let's move this in a bit. Just to get the mirror to connect these parts up. Like so. I'm just going to move this part a bit like that, just so we have more clarity. And now we can start bridging these together to get our final polyflow. And then all we'll need to do is subdivide. So I'm going to quickly bridge everything together. A And then here, we just um pull this out vertically, and we get a pretty nice base. Now, of course, the exact placement of these loops isn't very good for now. We're going to move things around a bit. But this is basically a pretty good leg topology. You've got more creases around where the leg bends, and this is usually what I do. We might add in more loops. But, well, there's no point in talking about it until we get to that part. So let's pull down to the end of the leg here. And let's get rid of our shoes. I try and make it a little bit more even. I Okay, this will do for now. And we can just add the extra loops in. Keeping it super low poly now, 'cause there's no point in, you know, making extra work for yourself, having to manually place more points than you need to. You know, something like this is probably what maybe a Playstation two character would look like. I'm going to move these two loops closer to the knee because that's where we want more topology. And then on the flat parts, we don't need as much. So maybe I did a few too many here. Okay, I think this looks fine for this stage. We're going to tweak the placement of these a little bit more. So I'm going to make this one more narrow. And move this one up. Turn off symmetry for a minute. And we basically want this to go straight. Although we also want to follow that seam on the cloth so to make unwrapping easier and texturing. This sort of needs to go up a lot. I I'm gonna move this down so it goes a little bit more straight. Uh, I just noticed I think I have my alphabet wrong, and my shortcuts may have looked a bit funny there down in the right, but I think they're still legible. Um, Okay, I think this is as far as I'm going to take it before. Actually, let's move these across. Because it looks a little bit uneven here. Okay, I'm just going to subdivide now once and add another Edit poly conform everything. Now, I'm looking at this, and this might actually be enough for our final topology. Let me just compare with the shoes. And let me try adding another subdivision level just to see how that looks. This looks a little bit too dense to me for such a flat area. So what I think we're going to do is work a little bit more at a few more loops to this spot. Until this is dense enough because we want it to be about, you know, a little bit dense, so it sort of matches this, but not as dense as two subdivisions were. So we're just going to add a couple more loops to the low poly until it starts looking right. So I'll add one down the side here. Let's bring our high poly back. And we want one across the top here. A and we want one loop to add a bit here. But we don't want it going down through here because that'll be too dense. So what we're going to do is have a pole over here. A pole, I'm not sure if I explained before it's just a vertex. That has let me just see. It's a vertex that looks like this, so it's one with, you know, at least three edges coming out of it. Whereas regular one would be four. Yeah. I'm not sure if this one is in the right place. We might move one down, although I might just add a loop to the in side here instead. Of course, it's hard to tell with that extra, you know, folds in the way. But because we're going to have to retop over those folds, what I'll do is I'm going to move it down by one. So we're going to put it here instead. Like this. And we also want one going along. Yeah. Um I think what I'll do is cut like this. And then we can have some extra loops that go here? So you get some more topper to fill this curve out? A little bit more on the legs as well, going downwards. Now, it's okay to have these polygons are not square but rectangular because there's a lot more curvature in this direction than there is vertically. A I'm not worrying about these details because you sort of want to build these details into a nice regular topology. You don't want to build your main base topology around a bunch of details. It's much better to just have them cut into a cleaner topology than it is to build your whole topology around, you know, some little weird details. Just checking if this looks dense enough already. I think that's looking a lot better. Also checking how this topper looks. It looks a little wongy in some places. Namely here. It looks like we ended up with an end on somehow. I don't think we connect it this way, did we? That looks a little bit better. Now we left the triangle down here. Let me just, uh, figure out. Oh, yeah. We were going to do this, I think. Although I don't think that's the right placement. I think we want to do that here. You want some extra topo down here under the butt to get this sort of curve. But I think this is dense enough. And also not just for that curve, but also because the bend is going to go right along here. So you want to support that extra deformation. Like that. Now, I'm not entirely sure. We need this on the backside. Let's see, but we do need you know, we need an extra loop. Although, yeah, let's do that what we did at the front on the back side as well. Let me think about this for a second. I think we will see if we need more once we get the subdivision in I think this one we need to move over to the side. Yeah, that's much better. Okay. Uh, let me just sort of even this bottom part out. Relax tool doesn't really work well on parts that are so round. So this is gonna be a bit of manual work. This is why you always want to work lower instead of having to move, you know, twice as many points. Just, you know, make sure it's all even and you don't have a bunch of edges bunched up in one point. Don't worry about seams too much yet, because once we subdivide, then we'll have more things more topology to play. So, yeah, we're getting pretty good here. These all seem quite regularly spaced apart from here. This picks a little bit messed up. We're definitely gonna need, uh, these two loops in order to spot all these crazy faults. Um Okay, let me take a look at it by itself. I think these needs to move inwards hole. I kind of do need more top up down here. But I'll leave that to the total smoothed version. Um, This needs to go up more. Should be in a sort of cleaner arc. I like that. I think this is, uh, yeah. Let's move on. Let me just double. Okay. Let's bring back our high poly. Some parts will be too dense, other parts won't be dense enough, so we'll always just be adding, you know, a loop or two or getting rid of them in places that don't need them. So up here, I think we need to spread them out a bit. And let's have a loop that follows this waistband. This will be nice and easy to texture and unwrap. If we get it to follow the waistband, then every other same. Yeah, at this point, it might be good to bring up the concept. You can check which parts are different pieces of fabric. I'm going to bring this up and you can find the concept artist for this piece over there. You can see that um This pocket is a different color of fabric, and then this intersection is also a different color of fabric. So we probably want UV seams that go along these pockets. So we'll be cutting these into the mesh. If it was the same kind of fabric, I wouldn't do that. In a place like this because it doesn't really follow the flow of topology. Now, of course, you can texture without making UV cuts to the islands. But what's nice to be able to do is have tiny textures. So I'm working along here, and I'm thinking we need an extra loop. The front doesn't have that problem because we did this whole deal. So I'm thinking I'm going to have to do that for the back side as well. I'll clean up the inner side of this leg first before I reattach the other side of the hi poly here because we are going to need it to finish up this The finish up the growing area. You see we're getting really dense over here, but we do need that density to be able to cause this part of stretch is way out. So that is, that is fine. That's what we need. Okay, I'm going to reattach the left side of the high poly. Like that. And we're going to keep working here. Oops, I attach the low poly as well. Okay, we sort of have our square topology in. I'm gonna cut this detail in. So get this along the seam. So we can have a nice UV cut across here. I'm gonna start cutting this detail out. Like that. Now, we could use an extra loop going upwards you. So I will just continue this up. I think I can do this instead. Like that looks pretty good. And we can just bring this bit up a bit. Well, actually, let's just go down there. Okay, we're almost at the end of this chapter. We have the sort of base mesh or the rough retpper work on all of the pants done, basically. We have all the polyloops in place. All that's left is to, you know, add in all the extra folds for the cuts and the sort of paneling detail, all sorts of stuff like that. Which is a time consuming process, and it's quite monotonous. So those videos will be time lapsed. Right now I'm just checking the symmetry just to see if there's going to be a lot that we're going to have to reconform in order to get it working on the other side. Okay, I'm signing off on this chapter, Chapter eight, and in the next chapter, we're going to continue working right where I'm leaving off here. 10. 09 Retopologising The Legs Part2: Welcome to Chapter nine. In this chapter, we will be continuing to work on the pants. We're going to be adding in all of the folds and the details you see on the pants in this chapter. So there's going to be a lot of, you know, fold work and stuff like that, which, you know, it's quite repetitive. That's why this chapter is sped up. The tools being used are also, pretty basic, mainly just the cut tool and drag tool, stuff like that. So um, nothing much really to see, but I think it is useful to see how I handle cut folds and stuff. If it's something you haven't done before, you know, there can be quite a few questions on, like, what do I do for folds? So, there will be a lot of that here. Right now I'm just cleaning up this top fold over here. And when it comes to these rope parts, you can model them in or have them as a separate object. I'm not sure which I'm going to do yet. So I'm going to leave that when I get to that part. Now, I do want an edge running along this entire cutout or cut in or whatever you would call this sort of detailing on the fire where it's like a separate piece of fabric sewn in. And there's a few reasons. One of them is just because there's that slight edge, and I'm thinking I probably want to model that in. And another one and the bigger reason is because of how I'm going to texture it's a lot easier to texture if you have these things on separate UV islands. And another thing you can do is use micro tiling textures. So like a tiling normal for, you know, just the thread and the structure of the fabric. And you can also do like a tiny AO and a tiny base color for that as well. And you can only really do that by applying a separate material to that area. Otherwise, it's quite expensive to do resource wise by, you know, blending together materials, and it's a huge hassle, and you need, like, a separate mask texture for that. So usually the way games do it is to have a separate material applied to each different panel that receives a micro tiling texture. So I do want the whole outline of this thing to have an edge running along. And I want generally to have an edge running along every seam in the fabric, and that is basically how you always re top of fabrics. You always want edges running along where you have seams. I mean, there's probably exceptions to this rule, but that's the general gist of it. You want to have an edge running along seams. I'm also putting another loop around that seam I just added there around the panel because there's double stitching that goes around all the way around this panel, and it is quite visible in the silhouette in some places. I just swapping out the material here, and you can see the vertex little points or ticks, they're called are still visible, even in object mode when I've got everything turned off. The way to fix that is to right click on the object, go to object properties, and turn off vertex ticks. Now, you will want to cut this pocket into the surface as well, but I'm actually going to move downwards and work on the folds around the ankles for now. So this is going to be very similar to what I did for the front of the shoe, just a lot more of it. Right now I'm going along and aligning these that's to that seam over there. And the same thing with the zipper. Now, what I tried to do here is to hide the left side of the hi poly with the hide tool or the hide function. But that doesn't work because you can still snap the hidden vertices or faces if you do that. So what you have to do is detach those faces. And, yeah, if you're having trouble working on something because your hi poly is in the way, always remember to detach it and don't struggle that kind of stuff. Just detach it. And then when you need it again, then you can reattach it. Don't know, mess around with trying to work your way around those sort of obstacles. What I'm doing here is I'm just aligning the vertices to places where it's quite obvious, you know, and putting in the first, sort of most basic cuts along the crests. Usually, I'll do the crest first and then do the valleys. Because if you do the crest first, then that sort of raises those sort of planes up out of under the low poly and it gives you a really clear view on where to cut your valleys. Now, when it comes to folds, especially when there's a lot of these creases and all sorts of fabric folds, it can get a little bit confusing on how far to go and, you know, how many edges to add in and how concerned should I be about, following every last little curve? Now, I think the best way to sort of figure this out is to take a look at, you know, once again, take a look at models from games, ribbed models or anywhere else where you can see the actual topology and sort of see what they've done. Or in this case, since you have, you know, my workflow to look at, then, you know, just look at what I'm doing. So, you know, it is a fine balance, and it is pretty subjective on, you know, how dense you should go. How many of these curves, how small does a curve need to be until you just ignore it and don't add individual cuts for when it comes to fairly intense curves like this, you pretty much do need to do something for all of them. And that's just what comes with, you know, aiming for more AA or, you know, higher fidelity, real time character, right? But this will look quite nice when it's done, right? Because all those folds will look quite smooth and definitely look real and solid instead of just like a normal. So another thing to look out for is, you know, take a look at your low poly by itself and see if any curves are looking really pointy and jagged, because that's really easy to happen when you're doing adding these cuts. Like, it'll look fine when you have the high poly underneath. But as soon as you hide the hi poly, you'll see a bunch of jagged, really messed up edges. So yeah, keep an eye out for that. And we'll probably see some of that later on in the studio. So this is a lot of the same stuff, right? I'm just cutting in more edges where I need them. I'm trying to sort of maintain that same original grid pattern that was there, but it's not the most important thing in the world. And I'm also trying to make sure that I don't leave the peaks as just one edge thick. It's always, you know, two edges along the peaks to make sure that they're not really razor sharp. So they look, you know, round as opposed to triangular. So I think I'm just going to let the recording play through a little bit and have a little bit of a time laps section here because there's not too much new stuff going on here, and all that really matters is what's going on on screen. Like, you can see what I'm doing. There's not too much that I can explain over this. So I'll leave this and have a little bit of a time lapse segment until we come up to something new. So I want an edge running down either side of the zipper here, so I'm just going to move all the vertices to be around the zipper. Now, sometimes artists will have a trim sheet and have tiling textures for things like zippers, but in this case, because we already have the high poly of the zipper there, it would sort of be a shame not to use that and bake it down. So I'm going to just bake the zipper down here. Now another little thing I'd like to mention regarding Polycount is when it comes to portfolio pieces, if saving a few triangles is going to even slightly compromise the look of your final model, I feel like it's better to put those triangles in because, you know, you're not making this for an actual product that's going to ship. You're making this for a portfolio, and it has to look as good as possible. Now, that doesn't mean you can be inefficient. You have to be efficient and put all of your triangles where they make sense. And they need to look right. All of your decision making needs to make sense, but, you know, you don't have to work to the actual limitations of a game. Now, these days, those limitations are really high, so it's not really something to worry about. But if you're ever asking yourself, should I add in this, you know, extra card to make this look nicer or should I save? Don't save. Make your portfolio pieces look nice and smooth and not jagged, but be efficient about it. B you know, effective with the topology. So even if you're using more, make sure it's not in a wasteful way, make sure. So we are pretty much done with the ankle here, and now we can move on to the knee. I'm going to push all of these vertices out above the surface using the push pull brush and then conform it back down. That seems to help the conform tool when you have a thin, two sided mesh. If you push the vertices out above the surface and then conform down, it does a much better job of snapping to the front side. So there's only really, like, a few more finishing touches left to do here. There's just a few folds I haven't really got into yet, and a bit of tweaking left to do. So I think I'll go back to just having a time lapse for this part. A h do. So So now we're working on the knee. This is all going to be basically the same as what we did for the ankle or, I guess, the end of the trousers, that's not quite the ankle. The only thing to keep in mind is that horizontally, it needs to be a little bit more dense because the knee is an area that has, you know, so much defamation. So you need to have it be a little bit more dense. Um now, of course, there's a bunch of folds in this area, so we're going to have to be that's already forcing me to make the topology more dense in this area. So, you know, really, I don't have to think twice about adding more loops, but if you have, like, a straight pant leg, even if it is straight and you don't need those loops for the silhouette or the form, you still need to add them in because of, you know, how much flexing there is in that area. Now, before, what you would do is you would have the edges collapse on the inner side of the knee. That's with lower polycunt characters. But these days, that's not really what we do anymore. It's just straight horizontal loops, just because we have enough topology to play with that the weight painting can carry all of the sort of deformation you need, and you don't need to have specific topology for that area. Again, I'm making sure that these creases don't end in just one sharp edge. You don't want the angle to be more than 45 degrees because that ends up looking quite sharp in the silhouette. You want two, maybe three, if it's a very large curve. Loops to sort of define that. Now, you can see that the quads here are taller than they are wide, whereas the general advice for them to be square, but in this case, it's okay because we have a lot more curvature going around horizontally because it's essentially a circle, the horizontal cross section than we do vertically, where it's quite flat until we get to the creases. So, you know, in cases like that, of course, you're going to have more geometry going along horizontally than you are vertically, just because that's where you need more detail in order for the leg not to look, you know, really like a hexagon, right? There's a few more folds to go here. Just go to move these alerts into closer to that fold, adding a little cut for this valley here, and another one for the little indent up there as well. And, yeah, sort of shift, shift verts close to the edges of, you know, close to either valleys or peaks when you can. But when it's too far, that's when it's time to add an extra cut. In a couple seconds, you'll see, I messed up a little bit with the recording and I didn't record a couple minutes, but I went back and I still recorded a little demo for you guys just to show you what I did there. So I moved over these loops to the right a little bit. And the way I did that is by turning on edge constraints and just shifting them over with the transform tool. And the way I selected those sections of edges is with point to point selection. So you hold down Shift, click your first point. And then while still holding Shift, you click another point and that there's a point to point selection, and then you can just move it along on the X axis with constraints turned on. And that's an easy way to shift over edge loops that are in the wrong place without having to use the conform move tool or the drag tools. Now, remember to turn off edge constraints whenever you use the conform tool because that'll mess up your topology a little bit when it's trying to conform to edges while also conform to the mesh. Mm Hmm. Okay, we're coming up to the end of Chapter nine here. We've made some pretty good progress in this chapter. We're almost done with a knees, and next chapter, we're going to work on the butt a little bit more and that fi detail and the pocket up at the top. And also, we're going to go through and refine everything a little bit more still. It's going to be a lot of the same detailing, just adding more geometry in places and making sure it conforms nicely to the high poly and there's no jagged iges when you spin the camera around. So thanks for watching Chapter nine, and I'll see you in Chapter ten. 11. 10 Retopologising The Legs Part3: Hi, guys. Welcome to Chapter ten. We're continuing work on the legs in this chapter. Right now, I'm really doing a thorough pass over all of these folds, like almost a final pass, really. I mean, I might come back to them another time, but, you know, getting really close to the final result here. So it's a lot of thincky, you know, just moving stuff around and adding a few, you know, more loops to places. Again, I will mention not to worry too much about the original, you know, straight loops being readable anymore. Um, when you've got complex folds like this, it's basically not possible to make you know, it's not possible to really get those folds in and keep the topology easily readable. So it's not really a huge deal if you're, you know, adding a bunch of loops, and it's not really looking as tidy anymore. I think any professional would be fairly understanding why you've done those things if you've put the loops in the right place, which, like I said before, I'm trying not to leave the peaks as a sharp edge. And the same applies to a lesser extent to the valleys because the valleys aren't really contributing to the silhouette as much. So you typically don't need as much topology in the valleys. But on the parts that really stick out, that's where it's really important. But it also depends on how many polygons you have to work with. If you have less, then, you know, obviously, your mesh is going to look a little bit more pointy. But there are things you can do to alleviate that even if you are working with less polygons. Like you can slightly you can make your folds slightly less pronounced on the low poly, and they'll still bak down fine from the high poly, even in that case. And you can sort of re top you can generalize more and not stick to the high poly as much in the low poly and sort of let the normal map carry more. But in this case, you know, I do have the polygons to work with. I do have, like, a high enough budget to model all of these in in a quite detailed way. So I'm not really having to worry about those sorts of things. I'm just, you know, making sure everything looks smooth. Here I'm working on this rope detailing in this area. Now, I actually, later on, I do go back and redo this part slightly. So if you are following along with these videos, then I will mention sort of what not to do if you are following along. Right now I'm cutting in alongside every rope. And what I do end up doing right now is I end up modeling the rope into the legs. So what I'll do in a minute, once I cut all of these, cut around each rope is I'll bell them outwards and use that to form, you know, the raised parts of the rope. And later on, I do end up going back and deleting the raised part and only leaving the indents of the rope and then having a separate mesh for the ropes that uses tiling, UVs and texture. So this part you can still follow along all of the parts involving, you know, the indents where the rope is pressing into the pants here. This part remains, and I do end up keeping this because, you know, it's still part of the pants, and it's still part of the whole effect of the rope. So right now, you're free to follow along. You know, I'm just cutting in alongside these ropes and making sure it's aligned to the surface, and you know, adding a reasonable amount of detail here, but not too much because this is it's still going to be pressed in and hidden under these ropes more or less. It's just sort of to avoid too much clipping and to make sure, you know, the surface is below the rope that ends up getting placed here. So, yeah, just moving the verts to make sure they're in the right place either side of these ropes and, you know, merging vertices that are really close to each other. 'Cause after you do your first sort of rough tracing with the cut tool, you will end up with, like, triplets of vertices next to each other, where you've cut right next to a corner and stuff like that. So that's, like, really easy to weld and clean up. That's, you know, that doesn't really leave that many questions when you're working on these parts. Um, there are some parts where you have to, like, think for a second, whether it's a good idea to, you know, merge some of these herds, like in the corners where two ropes intersect and stuff like that. Generally, you know, you sort of have to eyeball it and see. Sometimes you'll try something and you'll see that it doesn't quite look right and, you know, go back and fix it. Right now, I'm just, you know, cleaning up all the engons that were left over from the whole process of cutting stuff in, and now I'm beveling stuff. And this is the part I would suggest you don't follow along with, because I do end up undoing all of this in about 5 minutes in this sped up recording. So in real life, you know, this took me, you know, this mistake cost me about 15 minutes, so all in all, it's not really a huge deal. I decided to leave it in just firstly, in case anyone's curious to see how I would have modeled the rope into the pants because that's still a valid option when you're doing low poly meshes. Sometimes you'll decide to model ropes or details like this into the surface. Instead of having them as a separate object. So if I already have all of this recorded footage, I may as well keep it in for you guys. And then also, you know, I'll show you I guess it shows you that it's okay to change your mind while you're doing retopo if you because sometimes you can only tell after you've done something, right? So I did this. I took a look at it, and I thought, actually, this is going to be a pain to texture later on, and I'm going to want to have a low poly separate for the ropes. So I went back and I redid this part. So that's why I'm keeping it in the footage. If you don't want to see me mess around with these bells and modeling in these ropes to the low poly, then skip ahead to about 11 minutes into the recording, so that will be four more minutes from now. A do. The So here's where I'm correcting that little misstep I did with deciding to bell these parts outwards. So I'm just quickly welding everything down a little bit. And, um this is, if I did have enough undoes to, you know, go back to before where I beveled out, then I would have just undone a bunch of times. But depending on how you have your preferences set up, you have, you know, I think I have mind set to 100 undoes. If you have too many more than that, then it can start to use up a little bit too much Ram. I think I've just left it at default, really, though, because I really need to undo that much. But it would have been useful in this case. Another thing you can do is put an edit poly down right before you do something that, you know, something like I did here with that bevel, something you think you might want to go back to later, or you can just make a duplicate of the whole mesh if you really feel like it. But in this case, I hadn't done either of those things. So I have to spend a couple minutes undoing, you know, welding things together. And now I'm actually I think I was done with that by this point, and now I'm actually moving stuff around to how I want the topology to look for, you know, keeping in mind the fact that the ropes are going to be a separate part. So I made the sort of indents a little bit wider on the low poly. And I used a little bit less topology inside the indens so just one edge running down the middle, I think. Because that part's going to be underneath underneath the rope so it's not really going to be visible. And now I'm adding in that little sort of bevel that results in, you know, the paneling of the cloth being sewn on top of this panel that's underneath. And I thought it might be a good idea to model this in because it is actually quite a high bevel. So it is going to be visible in closer shots. Or in really high resolution shots. If we add in this extra little bevel, it will make a nice little detail where if you're looking at it from a sort of frontage angle, it will sort of occlude the part behind it, a tiny bit. And it's just sort of when we're working with this poly count, that's the sort of detail you might want to include. So bebles like this. You know, in this case, it's still sort of optional. Like, you can easily get away with not modeling this sin, but, you know, I decided that I did want to model this sin because even if it is a tiny impact, I felt like it would add to the final renders. So yeah, doing a little bit more cleanup here in the middle parts, underneath the ropes. And also, there's a few creases in these sort of puffier parts. So I'll address those as well. But right now I'm mainly focusing on these big indents left by the ropes. And these sort of middle parts where the ropes crossover is where it's a little bit confusing. Because there's a lot of different edges coming all to one point and you want to be efficient and you don't want it to look too messy. And these points are also kind of a little bit confusing, not confusing, but it's just a little bit of a puzzle figuring out how much are you going to weld up? How much are you going to leave in there? Because you have two grooves going into one spot and sort of becoming one groove. So it's not immediately clear if you should just weld everything up or if you should let those edges go. And in this case, I didn't really weld everything up. I left a few extra edges in there. I think that's the better solution in this case. And yeah, just wiggling things around with a jag tool just to make sure they're nice and evenly spaced out. And, you know, this part definitely needed an extra cut just because of, you know, how round it is and puffy. And a little bit lower down. You can see this. I'm obviously going to have to add a bunch more topo down there as well just because not only do we have these puffs, but also it's starting to get creased there from the knee. So that place is going to take a little bit of work, too. But, you know, it's all stuff you've seen before, just the cut tool and the conform tools and stuff like that. So I think from here on, I'm going to cut out the commentary for a bit and just leave you with a little bit of time lapse. Now, when it comes to these folds, you can put a little bit less work into refining them because they're not actually that visible in the silhouette. That area, you know, it's kind of obscured. It doesn't really pop out on the silhouettes. So if you have you can put slightly less edges into, you know, making sure it's not pointy and stuff like that, because it's all quite occluded and it doesn't really stick out from, like, a side view or a front view. So I'm just really, most of this, I'm quite lucky because these falls go diagonal to the polygon flow. So I can just cut from one corner of a polygon to the next. Which, you know, basically isn't really affecting the topology at all, because if you consider the fact that everything gets triangulated when it goes into game engine, all I'm really doing is telling, you know, defining which angle to triangulate, which direction to triangulate in. Now, of course, in some cases, I am actually cutting across a polygon. Where, you know, the fold isn't exactly matching the diagonal angle between polygons. And, you know, that's fine, too. We've been doing that a lot for the knees and stuff. But, you know, just like a thing to keep in mind, if you are cutting diagonally across polygons just from one corner to the next, that's literally not affecting the actual topology at all. All it's doing is defining which direction that polygon is going to get triangulated in once it goes into game engine once it gets sported. So that's sort of like a handy thing to know. Like, if you've gone through an area and basically triangulated all of it, so, you know, it better suits the folds in that area, you really don't have to worry about cleanup or anything at all because you basically haven't actually changed the topology in any significant way. You've just defined the triangulation. Now I'm working on this pocket area, or maybe this is just a panel. I'm not sure, but I'll call it a pocket just to be clear. And I do want this edge cut into the surface because there is that slight bevel there. And also, I want that edge there so I can apply different material to that area and have its own micro tiling texture. And for that, you know, we need to be able to select polygons. Otherwise, we would need a mask, and that's, you know, extra extra work, extra processing power. So in these cases, you want to cut that area out with topology instead. So once again, where I can, I'm moving edges that are close to that seam or detail into position and where I can't, I'm just cutting in extra topology. And first I do a rough pass and then I'm going to go back and add in extra topology for the round corners that need it. Right now I'm pulling up a little diagram I made or a sketch you could call it up on screen. And I did this on my second screen, which is a display tablet, and I didn't think to record it. And, you know, I do these things on the display tablet because it's a little bit easier to draw and stuff on that. Let me just quickly explain how I made this. So I took two screenshots of the low poly I'm working on, one of the current low poly, and then another one with a few edit polymodifiers turned off back to an earlier stage where the topology was more clear. I took those screenshots without changing the camera angle. I pasted those into Photoshop. I put the older screenshot, the screenshot of the low poly from earlier with the edited polymodifiers turned off. I put that on a layer on top and then I'm pretty sure I did a color selection and I selected that orange wire frame that lets me If you invert that selection, you can quickly delete the background. And then you can also do a huge shift on the wireframe that's left and, you know, use a few other like a contrast or a vibrant adjustment layer to make it brighter if you need to. And I just overlaid that on top with maybe, you know, not 100% opacity. So, you know, you can see both of the wireframes, you can compare them to each other to what you have and what you want to change back, stuff like that. And the software I'm using to have this up on screen is called PureRef. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but it's really great piece of software. It's completely free, and I highly recommend you get it. It's great for having your references up on screen right next to your model. You can recize that window however you want. You can paste as many images as you want in there. You can just use it as a reference board for storing images together. You can add in extra little notes. It's a really great piece of software for this stuff, and I use it a lot. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I think it's pretty essential and it's free, so there's no reason not to get it. So go ahead and get yourself PureRef and look at the hockey list or the help section and that'll show you all of the shortcuts and how to use it and how to have it up on screen. That's PureRef PURE REF. And, yeah, I highly recommend you get that. It's a great piece of software. So I'm finishing up this pocket area. And if we take a look at the low poly by itself, you can see our highlights are kind of jagged looking and not very nice. And this is a result of the vertex normals. They can't really account for this much curvature with that little bevel and also the fact that it's cutting across diagonally a bunch of polygons. And this is a good reason why we turn up the gloss on our material so we can see issues like this. Now while you probably can bake a normal map from a low poly like this, it can present some issues and like, it'll probably look fine 90% of the time, but it's good practice to sort of not have stuff like this going on in the low poly. I will go into detail more about normal maps and explain areas like this when we get to baking because it helps to pull up a normal map and show you guys. But for now, keep in mind that we probably don't want jagged, looking shading on our low poly. Even if we are going to apply a normal map to this, we don't want stuff like this going on. Now, there's a few ways to fix this. You could probably fix it by adding in a smoothing group. But we don't want to put smoothing groups on organic objects because they'll show up as seams on the normal map. Another thing you can do is add in an extra extra vertices to better carry that transition in normal direction. And if we add in that extra edge, that'll basically get rid of this sort of ugly triangulation. Now, I'm just drawing out the original topology with the Snip and Sketch tool just so, you know, once I add in a bunch of topology, I can compare and see that I haven't know, messed up the original too bad. So by adding in this extra edge loop around the outside of this pocket, we're going to have more vertices in that area, and the transition in vertex normal direction will be more gradual, and we won't have that crazy zig zagging shading on the low poly. So that's what we're doing here. And, you know, it also accounts for that little bevel or that little seam around the pocket. And you can see that looks much nicer on the outside. We still have the same issue on the inside of the pocket, but we'll just do the same thing in that area as well. But you can already see this looks much better. So now I'm just going to go ahead and do the same thing on the inside of the pocket and that'll be pretty much everything done for the low poly of the pants here. And just welding up the excess of disease here, doing a little bit of a cleanup. But yeah, if you are getting really crazy zigzaggy shading in your low poly, you probably want to add an extra edge. And you can see that looks pretty much perfect now. There's no more of that weird shading going on. So that's exactly what we want to see. And I will explain this more when we get to baking because it helps to have a visual example of what's going on on the normal map with areas like this. And I don't have that example right now because I haven't done a bake on this mesh. So yeah, make sure you pay attention to the baking chapters. There's going to be a lot going on there, a lot of explanation. Okay, we're pretty much done with Chapter ten here. We've got the right side of the leg almost completely done here. And the left side, it's not a complete mirror image, but it's very similar. We are going to have to go in and adjust it to get it perfect a little bit later. Right now, I'm going to move on to the torso because I want to have all of the parts done to 75% at least. Before I go in and do a final pass on the topology. It's probably not a good idea to completely finalize a piece before moving on to the next one. It's good to have your whole model re topologized to, like, you know, 75, 85% of the way there, and then do a final pass on everything instead of, you know, finishing each part individually. And then, you know, you get to the end of it and you realize it's not everything sei homogeneous and stuff like that. So that's why we're moving on to the torso in the next chapter. So that's all for Chapter ten, and I'll see you in the next one. 12. 11 Torso Retopo And Adjusting The High Poly: Welcome to Chapter 11. In this chapter, we're working on the torso. We're also doing some repositioning on the hi poly. So if you're rewatching this chapter or you just want to see that part, then skip ahead to 10 minutes. Right now I'm just doing a little bit of cleanup so that I only have my torso visible right now. I'm getting rid of all the parts. That I don't want, I got rid of the hood because while we are going to retpoxze into this neck covering, for now, when I'm getting the basic loops in, it'll be a lot easier without that hood in the way. We just want the basic torso shape and maybe a bit of the arm so we have something to form the shoulder around. So now that we've hidden everything we don't need and cleaned up our scene a little bit, we can start work on the retopper just making a new object with that drop down in the poldraw panel and setting up symmetry. And drawing out our first little face with the step build tool. Now, actually, I'm going to put this on the shoulder because that's the part I'm going to do first. The shoulder is basically the most important part when it comes to topologizing the torso. Everything else is really straightforward. The torso is just a cylinder, really. And the neck is also quite straightforward. Now, it can be a little bit more complicated if you have clavicles and, you know, if you have a belly button visible and stuff like that. But with just close like this, it's really straightforward, and the sort of base is really straightforward, and then you have to go into adding folds and the details of the closes into that base. So the first most important loop is a vertical one around the shoulder. And then off that loop, you do another one horizontally across. And these are basically the two most important loops. And the reason why we do this instead of just extruding out a cylinder from the shoulder straight down is so we can have a few more extra loops or some extra geometry in the actual shoulder area. Because if you just extended straight down, you would really have stretch out topology on the outer side of the arm and then it would be really compressed in the armpit part. So this helps us get the best of both worlds. Now I'm just bridging across to the torso to make a loop for the torso, really straightforward. And I'll do the same for the back. Now, you probably want to have a few extra edge loops running around the front than the back because even on a male torso, the torso extends and and is round on the front side than it is the back. Now I'll do the neck. So the neck is pretty similar to what I did for the lower down on the torso. I'll just bridge an extra loop across here. Now, this is slightly different to how you would do it if this area was wearing skin tight clothing. But because we have that sort of cloth neck piece, I'm doing this. Istill shifting things around a little bit so it makes more sense. And adding the extra edge loops that I need. Again, keep things really low poly at this stage. Don't overdo it. The less polygons you have to work with here and, you know, have enough polygons so you can make sense of what you're doing, because if you do even less than it'll sort of be confusing. I won't really represent the shapes you're trying to achieve. So, you know, that also adds confusion. But don't have so many that you're spending a lot of time dragging edges around and stuff. So something like this is fine. And here's how we form that shoulder area. You can see that gives us a pretty nice even topology, and it's not too complicated. I find this is what I use usually for my personal work. And from there on, it's just extending downwards. So the arm is really straightforward. I don't do anything special for elbows. It's just straight edge loops. And the body is the same way. When it comes to cloth, if you're doing like an unclothed body, then, you know, you need to do a little bit more work in order to get musculat come across. But when it's cloves, then I just drag out loops straight down, and then you have to add the cloth detail and all the wrinkles and stuff. So Yeah, just dragging straight down to the bottom. Make sure you are not re topoing parts that are obscured. Right here, I'm re topping only down to where the pants start kicking in, not to the bottom of this whole high poly mesh, because that would be a waste of effort because that part's not going to ever be visible. So remember to make sure that you're not retping parts, you don't need to. And this is the basic body. This is pretty much all you need to do for the start of the torso. Now, of course, we are going to have to add topology to this to make it fit the clothes. There's a lot of clothing detail we're going to have to add into this low poly. I'm going to do as much of it as I can symmetrically. So all the collar and that sort of stuff I'll do in symmetry, and then I will, you know, work on top of the symmetry modifier, no longer in symmetry. So in this case, I did the low poly topology from scratch, and it is something I do quite often if the body I'm working on doesn't quite fit any base meshes that I have, but a lot of the time I will use a base mesh. Or the same base mesh that I sculpted the base body on. What I will do is I'll take the low subdivision of that and conform it to the final hi poly over the clothes and over everything, and that gives you a good starting point for your e topology. I didn't do that in this case because the shoulder topology of that base mesh that Mario used for the base body I don't quite like it. It's not very good for real time defamation. It's really good for sculpting, but it's not good for real time defamation. And there is different. For sculpting, you just want the topology to be as even as possible. Nothing else really matters. So that's why I didn't use that base mesh. And also, this is, you know, a tutorial. So it's good to show you guys how to do it from scratch, because there are going to be probably a lot of the time characters where no base mace mesh quite fits. Maybe it's got three arms or something, or maybe it's just not really human shaped. It's like an alien or something or stuff like that. But anytime you have a shoulder like this, you can sort of apply those principles to that. And doing it from scratch, it only takes like ten extra minutes. So, you know, Basmath it is a little bit of a time saver, but it's not a massive impact, especially when you're doing high fidelity AA style stuff where you want to get a lot of defaults modeled into the low poly. And that's the most time consuming part, not like this initial layout of the topology. So here I'm working on the collar a bit because it's quite a large sort of cloth covering over the neck. We are deviating a little bit from the standard topology you would have the neck area just because this is so prominent and it covers up the sort of what would be the natural shape of the neck. So I want to have a nice loop running around the edge of this collar. So I'm welding stuff and cutting new topology in to sort of match that. I'm trying to integrate that into the other topology as well as possible. So I basically want the collar to be all nice loops running, you know, concentric loops, running all the way to the top and not have to fuss with any extra stuff inside those loops. I might add a few more edges to the actual exterior part because, you know, it's where the most curvature is and where it sticks out of the silhouette but aside from that, I just want it to be even quads running concentrically along the top. Just basically a cylinder that gets squashed a little bit for where it goes in for the neck. And, you know, I'm trying to integrate this as well as possible into the rest of the topology. So, you know, because this is slightly different from what I had for the start, where I just did a neck, sort of more or less typically how you would do a neck, but it didn't quite match that outer rim area of this neck piece. And now I'm trying to figure out how to integrate that. And, you know, it's pretty straightforward at the end of the day. Not everything has to be super, you know, clean quads with no triangles and stuff. Especially when it's higher poly like this, you know, we have bigger budgets to work with. You can get away with a lot of triangles, and triangles can help defamation a lot of the time if it's what's required. So, you know, sometimes it is a little bit of trial and error. I'll try something and then see how it looks visually and decide I don't like it, and I'll go back. So that's what you see me doing a little bit here. I'm just trying to figure out, you know, what do I do with this loop? Do I you know, where do I put it? It's kind of hard to explain or really even define where, like, triangles are appropriate and what is good topo, because it's really so case dependent and there's no rules to it. So what I would say, when you're starting out and you don't really know what you're doing, just follow someone else's lead, like me doing with tutorial, just, you know, sort of follow roughly along with what I'm doing here. Then as you get more experience, you'll understand better for yourself, what's good and what's bad topo. Once you rig a few things, I think that understanding really comes across. And when I say rig, I don't mean a professional character. A rig for a game, that's a whole job of its own, and, you know, it requires its own training and learning. And that's not something I know how to do. But, you know, just rigging for posing your own models, like sort of more basic rigs. Even though they're a bit rougher, they really give you a good understanding of, you know, what is good topo. And, you know, some character artists don't really rig their models at all. They just pose them using, you know, the modeling tools and stuff or pose them in Zbrush. And that's definitely something you can do to skip rigging, and, you know, sometimes it saves time. It depends on the model, really. And it's perfectly valid. But I think trying to rig something yourself gives you a slightly better understanding of how topology works. And it's really useful for that. I will be showing how to make a basic rig, like I typically do for posing a character. And, you know, it's kind of fun to be able to pose a character in a couple of different shots really quickly and easily. You can get, you know, it makes making renders easier, you know, different renders in different poses, and it's nice to be able to, you know, have a little bit of fun with your model after you put so much work and time into making it instead of just making one render and being done with it. So, you know, that's another reason why I like to do a little bit of a rig on my models when I'm done with them. I'm working on the shoulder here, and I'm noticing that it's a little bit tight under the armpit. It would be better if the high poly arm was stretched outwards a little bit more. This is still serviceable. I can just about work under here, but I will be showing you guys how to adjust the hi poly pretty easily. And this is no fault to the person that made the hi poly. This happens to me all the time, and it's a fairly normal part of the process. So it's kind of good to get out of the mindset that, you know, this is a linear process where you just do the high poly, and then you do the low poly, and then you unwrap and then you bake, you know, in a linear fashion, and you never go back to an earlier stage to work on it more or just something. That's not how it works in reality. There's always going to be times when you need to go back and adjust the high poly. Sometimes you do your full re top and bake and you just realize that maybe a certain part just won't bake that way at all, and you need to change it or even scrap something entirely if you realize that it's not achievable in low poly. That happens all the time. Now, of course, that's different to this situation. But this happens to me every so often, too, where, you know, I sculpt something, and then I realize the tolerance isn't there for me to re topo and bake it, and I have to go and adjust it. So it's pretty good that we ran into this issue because this is another, you know, really useful thing to learn, you know, how to reposition your hi poly if you run into an issue like this. So that will be happening in a few minutes. I'm still working on this shoulder here. It's, you know, just doing some general cleanup. And I think we can just I'll just let this play out until we get to the hi poly adjustments. So you can see me checking the space I have underneath the arm just to see if I really do need to go in and reposition the hi poly. And I actually did this for the other arm as well, the mechanical one. There's actually even less space on that one. And that's how I came to the conclusion that I do need to do this whole part. All this work of repositioning. And this is actually fairly straightforward and a quick process, so it's really no big deal. So in our Z brush file, what we're going to be using to reposition the arms is the Z plug in transpose master. Now, what this does is it takes all of these subtols and puts them to their lowest subdivision level and combines them together. And that's the model we can use for posing and repositioning things. And then once you're done, you can extract all of the subtols back out of that merged object and apply all of those changes back to the hypolemshes. So right now, I'm going through and hiding everything we don't need, everything that I'm not going to move at all, or I don't need to see as a reference for how far I'm moving things. So it's just going to be the torso and the arms. That I'm going to leave visible because that's all we need to transpose. And the transpose master will only merge together and apply to objects that are visible at the time that you apply the transpose master. So this is useful if there's only one thing you need to move, and it's kind of obscured by other parts or other parts can get in the way. So it's useful to go through and hide everything you don't need. So I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes doing that. And you really want to make sure you have all the parts you need, like those little bolts on the mechanical arm, make sure, you know, you have those there and, you know, every little bit of string or whatever because that'll come back in the future and be really annoying if you've got everything done, and then there's one tiny part you missed that you have to manually figure out how to move or something like that. I'm deleting the layers so I can store a morph target on the right shoulder, which might come in handy if we have to adjust the sculpt after we move that shoulder or that arm because it's a human arm, once we move it, it might look if it looks unnatural at all or if it slightly breaks the anatomy, the morph target might be helpful if we have to do some slight adjustments to the sculpt to sort of make it look good again. The mechanical arm, I might want to use parts from the original three dS Max file that was modeled in for the topology. But in order to do that, those parts will have to be in the same position as this high poly. Since we're moving this high poly, those parts from the original three S Max file won't match up anymore. So to do this, I'm adding a cube, which is going to basically act as an exportable pivot point. Because we're going to snap the pivot point to one of the corners of this cube and then export the cube with this whole arm, and then we'll be able to snap to the pivot point in three max for this same arm and essentially repeat the exact transformation in three y max that we did in Zbrush. I found that this is pretty much Well, this is the only way that I know of exporting a pivot point because, of course, when you export meshes, it always puts the pivot point to zero on the coordinates. It doesn't export pivot points. Now, I'm going to subdivide this cube a few times because transpose master doesn't really work well with really low poly meshes. It tends to mess them up and destroy them. So if you add a few subdivisions first with smoothing turned off, you can essentially avoid that sort of error. And now we can click Tipose and the mesh is, you know, your whole tool is tipos, and all of the subtols are merged into one object, and they're all set to their lowest subdivision level. Now I'm masking off the parts of the arm that we're going to move. So basically everything from the shoulder downwards. And because for every single hard surface part, you want to select the entire object and have the entire thing masked because if you don't have the entire thing masked, then it's going to deform, and that's not what hard surface objects do. Now, the only parts that are going to deform when we move them are this upper arm part and the shoulder parts. I'm going to isolate them. And I want to make sure not to mask any of this edge that connects to the torso, because if that part moves, then we'll have a gap between our arm and the torso. So the way you want to position the mask across the shoulder is to basically have it going diagonally through shoulder. And you can click on your mask a few times to blow it, but make sure you're not blurring in the direction of the seam so it's better to invert your mask and blow it, you know, in the opposite direction than to blur in such a way that it will blur into that edge. And I also went over that edge with control Alt to make sure it's definitely unmasked. Now to snap your pivot point, it's just an Alt click on the vertex you want. So just Alt click on the bottom right corner of this cube, and we're going to do the same thing in three S Max if we need to. And that's how we're going to replicate this whole transformation. And now we just invert the whole mask, and I've got snapping turned on, so I know by how many degrees I have moved this arm. So there was one snap, which is five degrees. And you can see this gives us enough room for topology and baking. Now, the more you move an object in this way, the more you're going to mess up the whole sculpt and all the modeling work that's gone into it because, you know, you'll have to correct more and more things the more you move it. So I'm just going to move it the smallest possible amount that lets me continue working on the low poly, which is five degrees, just one snap with the the move to the transform Gizmo. And you can already see there's a few things we need to fix, even from a small transformation like this. So I'm just going across the whole part that we've moved here and fixing everything that's been messed up by this move. So just pulling this outwards, so it's sort of in the same relative position as it was before with the move topological tool. The move topological tool is really great because it will only work on a single polygroup or a single, you know, element of your subtol. So that's what you want to use for changes like this where you only want to work on one part at a time. So I'm just slowly going through and adjusting everything. So it looks like the way it did before, just moved upwards by five degrees. So just really subtle, you know, little fixes, just to make sure nothing's being, you know, put out of its correct position. And to avoid, like, ugly clipping like this. We want nice, clean lines and not weird clipped in lines. So this looks like the last little part we're going to have to adjust. And that should be good. We can move on to the other arm now. Just a few more little adjustments I noticed I need to do here, just to make that seem a little bit clean. Let's move on to this arm now. Now, you need to be a little bit more careful when you're doing human anatomy because it's very easy to tell when something is off. If you move it too much, you're going to have to do a lot more re sculpting to get it to look right again. Again, we're placing the mask diagonally through the shoulder like we did on the other side. And that's roughly the right placement. And now we can blur this mask out. But we don't want to we don't want it to blur too far down into the torso because you don't want to be pulling out the torso when you're moving the arm. Now, for the placement of the pivot point, just feel around for where your shoulder joint is on your body and it'll be slightly lower than that because that's where the center of the joint is. It's, you know, slightly lower than where you will be able to feel it. And that should be enough, and we can click TPos and have everything transferred to our hi Poly. I skipped that whole loading process there. Now, if you have two messages on your screen, you probably know this, but you just hit Control N to get rid of that one that's in the way. And what I'm going to do now is take a good look at the high poly of this and to see if it looks right, if we haven't really messed up the anatomy by doing this. And so far, it looks good. There's just a little bit of clipping we're going to have to sort out here. So, as always, you probably want to work in the lowest subdivision level. Whenever you're making large changes like this, always go to the lowest subdivision level. And here I'm using that morph brush from the morph target we stored right before we did all these changes with the transpose master. And in this case, it didn't really work. So, you know, because it only takes a couple seconds to store a morph target, it's something that's worth doing. In this case, it wasn't giving me the result I wanted because it was just pulling linearly back to where the topology originally was, and it wasn't giving me the right result, basically. It looked wrong. It was messing up the topology. So instead, I'm using just a move topological to fix this sort of issue. And it looks like we haven't really messed anything up by making this adjustment. So we should be good to go here. So now I'm just going to go through the process of exporting these two arms out. And you want to make sure you save this file separately from your other high Polyfils. This is going to be the file we use for baking, so we want to make sure we keep all of these meshes in their highest polygon count non decimated, so we can use them for baking. But we also need to export these meshes for retopo. So I'm doing exactly what we did at the first time we exported these meshes to three S Max, which is merging that folder and using decimation master on. And I'm exporting all of the visible subtols or actually, I just exported that on the regular way with the OBJ export. And now I'm exporting the shoulder, I'm not bothering with decimation muster now since we can just knock down a few subdivisions and these measures look fine if you do that. It doesn't affect the volume or the surface too much when you're working with messures that subdivide nicely. This doesn't work so well on hard surface that's where there's support loops that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. We want to make sure we export that cube as well so we can place our pivot point. So I'm just merging all the visible parts, so I can use decimation master on this, and I'm splitting off the cube so it doesn't get decimated because we want to be able to snap to that precise vertex, and if we decimate, then that vertex will get moved around. Now, the decimation didn't go right because there were either subdivision levels or layers on some of these hi poly objects. So I'm going to have to go back and fix that. So I'm just checking through all of the subtols that make up this arm for dynamic subtib and I found one there, just to make sure it will decimate nicely. And once that's all cleared up, I can go ahead and merge these objects again, do the same thing I did before by detaching the cube. You know, I'm masking it off so I can detach it properly. It's a bit annoying that it has a polygroup on each face, so I can't do that with one click, but that's fine. And once the cubes detached, I can apply decimation, and it all looks good this time, so I can go ahead and export this. I'm using FPS export here because there are two subtols I want to export once that cube and the arm. Yeah. All that's left to do is to import this adjusted mesh back into our re topology file. And this is where I'm going to end this chapter because I don't want to muddle up too many subjects into one chapter. So that's it for Chapter 11. I'll see you in the next one. 13. 12 Continuing Torso Retopolgy: Welcome to Chapter 12. Now that we fixed the hi poly, we can finally get to doing the detail pass on the topology for the torso. Right now, I'm just importing the arms we adjusted in Zbrush. And make sure you sort of organize them in your seam properly, so either name them correctly or put them in a layer. I'm just putting them in a layer just for these parts because, you know, I'm a little bit lazy when it comes to naming, so I don't individually name all my things, but I at least like to put them into layers that I can easily identify. Now I can get rid of the old arms. It's a good idea to get rid of, like, heavy objects you don't need because your sn can start to slow down a little bit if you've got millions and millions of polygons, especially in three Max. So if you've got heavier objects that are completely useless, then it's a good idea to get rid of them because even a small amount of lag or slow down when you're working can really add up over the hours and it just becomes frustrating like every single action you perform, if it takes a little bit longer for it to load, eventually adds up and it's not just the extra time it takes, but also just sort of the frustration from having to wait those extra seconds. So yeah, keep your scenes clean and as fast as you can. That also depends on your PC, of course. Here I'm working on the shoulder area, and I'm trying to copy what I did on the other side, but it's kind of tricky to flip things over in your head and do it manually. So instead of that, I'm just going to select the other side, control shift to duplicate it, delete the parts I don't really need. And then I can mirror it, roughly get it into position and weld it into place instead of doing this thing manually, right? So I'm deleting the parts on the original left side that I don't need, and I can go ahead with welding. Now I'm doing edge to edge welding, which is a tiny bit faster because you only have to weld half as many points, but it can be a lot more confusing when you're welding edges to each other because, if you weld in the wrong order, then, you know, you end up with a mess and you have to figure it out and undo. But if it's like a pretty clear case like this, then edge to edge welding can be a little bit faster. And you do that just by being edge mode with the weld tool selected. Now it's just a matter of aligning these tices to the correct parts on this right side, because, of course, these sides are slightly different to each other. Now, while it's not essential that I copy the topology from one side to the other, it's, you know, it's generally good practice to keep certain conventions on your model and not have every single part be doing something completely different, right? It's better to have some sort of standardization. So that's why I try to make sure I'm following the same sort of principles of topology on both sides, because there's a lot of ways you can re topologize a shoulder, and you could re topologize shoulder differently if you really wanted to. But it generally makes a lot more sense to do both in the same way, even if they are slightly different like they are in this case, I'd prefer if they were if they followed the same sort of edge low. And you can see, I am going to have to do something different on this side just because of how different it is to the other side. You've got multiple layers of cloth on the right side, and here it's a mechanical plate thing over the boob. So it's going to have to I won't be able to match that same topology, of course. But, you know, just try and keep things generally standardized. You don't have to go overboard with it, but, you know, keep in mind that things should be similar across the whole model. I'm adjusting what I did in this area because it doesn't quite make sense to me now that I'm looking at it. And this looks a lot more sensible to me right now. I'm not sure why I didn't do that at first. You know, sometimes it takes a while to notice these things, right? I I'm adjusting the edge flow a little bit on this edge loop I added just to make it fit into the other topology a little bit better. You can see that sort of follows the flow of the high polymsh a little bit more. All of these details here. There's going to be less cuts I have to add to sort of follow those details now. And what I am going to start doing now is adding in the cuts or moving stuff around to better fit the different panel lines or layers of fabric that there are around this model. That's the first thing I want to approach right now, not the folds and all the creasing detail, but instead the sort of very hard and specific panel lines or different, you know, sections of cloth there are. Because it'll be really confusing to cut those in once I have all my folds in. It'll be, you know, the topology gets more confusing once you model in the folds because you have all sorts of crazy cuts going diagonally and in all sorts of directions there. So I find it's better to put in sort of hard, really definite details in first and then follow up with the folds after that. So I'm starting by cutting in this I'm not sure what to call it. I guess this is a sleeve hole or something like that. But yeah, I'm cutting in the edge of this piece of shirt. And, you know, as usual, if the edge is really close to existing edge loops, then I'll just move those closer. But if it's not, then I'll just cut across. And now I'm doing the same for this hard surface panel on the mechanical part of the body. And, you know, I'm shifting stuff around as I go along and seeing what works, you know, I felt like that edge was moved a little bit too high up, so I moved it back to where it normally would have been and just added an extra edge. So, you know, keep an eye out for stuff like that and see what works. And we pretty much want to cut in all of the panel lines. Now, if it's a panel where it's basically the same height. There's no height difference between them, and it's not a super deep line, then you don't really need to model that in unless you're really planning on having two tiling materials over each panel. Now, when you're texturing, you generally want an entire panel to be one UV island. So when you're doing your low poly, you also need to keep that in mind and to put edges in such a way that you can make sure you can make a UV island out of every panel without having to cut across it at some point in order to get a good unwrap. Um, or, you know, don't leave polygons that crossover between two UV islands you're going to have, right? I think this will be more clear once we get to actually doing the UVs. And when you're doing UVs, you'll always you'll probably want to go back and change some of the topology if you notice something that's, you know, you didn't think ahead far enough when you were doing the low poly, right? I'm basically just reiterating here that, you know, it's not an entirely linear process. You are going to cycle back and adjust some things you notice in later stages as you're working along. So, you know, keep that in mind. It doesn't have to be perfect first time round. Now, of course, as you get more experienced, you will get more perfect first time round. But, you know, you're probably never going to get things right the first time round because there's always new information that comes up as you're working on something. So yeah, don't really focus on getting this low poly perfect first time around. Sort of, you know, get it, you know, pretty good. Don't be lazy when you're doing your low poly. You know, basically follow along with what I'm doing here. And then I think things will really click into place once you're doing the unwrapping and the baking. And I think if some of these things that I'm saying don't really, you know, click right now, I think they'll definitely make sense once you do the unwrap and the baking and you'll see what I mean when I say stuff about, you know, how to do your folds or, you know, stuff about UV seems. It can seem kind of abstract and not really make a lot of sense when I'm saying them right now. So you can see here, I'm actually modeling the torso and the shirt as one object. And the reason I decided to do this is because they're two objects that are basically on top of each other. There's not really a gap between them apart from in a few places. And for those places, I can sort of model in a little pocket that makes it look like they're two separate objects. So that's why I decided to model them as one. But that's not the only way to do this. You can also model things like this as separate objects. And this is actually something that bugged me a lot when I was starting out. I didn't know when to attach objects to each other, when to, you know, model them as one continuous object or just clip them into each other. And stuff like that. Now, towards the end of red topology, I actually end up changing my mind and splitting the shut off as its own object. And that's also a valid way to do it. Now, the upsides of modeling these two things as one object, it's a little bit simpler. It's less work. You don't have to model, you know, underneath two objects and you don't have to check for gaps between objects this way. The downside is it can look a little bit junky if the gaps are bigger, and by the time I got to the end of re topology, I decided that, yeah, it will look a little bit better if I model these as separate objects. But both are valid methods. It's a good thing that I decided to change my mind and you guys get to see me do both approaches, modeling them as one and modeling them as two separate objects. So to maybe sort of expand upon when you might want to make separate objects or when you might want to model things together as one object. Again, it really depends on circumstances. It depends on what you want to do with that model. Like, if you want to swap parts out, then you'll probably want them to be separate objects. So if it's like an RBG with different armor sets, you'll probably have separate objects for, you know, whatever you're wearing on your torso and the pants and stuff like that. None of those will be modeled together. Generally, I find it's a little bit easier to model things together as one. And it's a little bit easier to rig them then because you don't really have to worry about clipping and stuff like that. But if you have bigger gaps between those two objects, it can become a real hassle to model the inside of that gap so it looks good and it bakes well. And at that point, you might want to consider modeling them as separate objects like I did here. So yeah, a lot of different things you might want to weigh up. But in general, modeling them as separate objects might be a tiny bit more work, because, you know, you have to sort of make sure your edges are aligned in each object so they don't clip, and you have to model underneath each surface a tiny bit, as well. So you don't have holes in your meshes. So you don't see the areas that you've capped off under those meshes. If you decide to cap those areas off instead of just leaving empty holes, you know, you still need to make sure that those caps aren't really visible and intrusive when you look at your model. So yeah, there's a lot of things to weigh up there, but, you know, it's something you have to weigh up and decide. In this case, I would say, you know, now follow my lead, and then once you make a few models of your own, you can decide and it's always, you know, like I said, probably three or four times before now. You do your retpper, you do a test bake. You see if that looks good. A really important thing to do is to set up, like, a test scene in your rendering in whatever software you're going to be rendering, whether that's Unreal Engine or Mama zit. In this case, we're using Mama zit. So it's important to set up a test scene as soon as possible and be looking at your model in that test scene. As you're texturing, as you're baking, you know, always be looking at your model in the final software that it's going to be rendered in. Because that's something I did a few times when I was starting out. You know, I did all my texturing in substance painter. And then, you know, once I was completely finished with texturing, then I put it into Mama's and then you start seeing a bunch of flaws. Like, you start seeing a gaps that were maybe not as visible while you were texturing because you just never really looked at those angles. But then when you get your model posed and your camera setups in, you see that there's a gap visible blatantly in camera that you never noticed before. Or like a seam or, you know, even materials are handled differently in every single software. So you can make it look perfect in substance painter, but it will look slightly off in marmosete. So yeah, always have a test scene setup. Right now we can't really do a test scene because we don't have a low poly yet, but as soon as the low poly is done, and we start unwrapping, then I will be showing you guys how to do that test scene and, you know, how to work along with keeping that test scene in mind. So yeah, while I do end up changing some of this in terms of splitting off the vest from the torso, it's not actually a lot of work to, you know, do that conversion because all of the edge work I still need to do regardless of which method I choose, I still need the edges to look smooth and not jag it on the silhouette. So all I end up doing really is detaching those parts and then modeling the inner surface a tiny bit. So if you follow along exactly with what I'm doing right now on screen, you're not going to be, like, wasting really any time. So you can feel free to do that. Or if you kind of know what I'm talking about, then, you know, feel free to model them as separate objects as well if you sort of have an idea of what that is. But really, there's no difference. And, um, you know, even if you plan on having these as separate objects later on, it can be just worthwhile to model them together while you're at this early stage, just so you don't have to switch between two separate objects while you're doing this re topology work, right? So there's really no time lost in doing what I'm doing right now, so feel free to go ahead with that. And I've got most of the cloth details and the mechanical details in now. So what I'm moving on to is just all of this cloth stuff and all the folds, which is the same as what we did on the pants, and nothing's really changing here. So what I'm actually going to do is just, you know, put some music on and leave this as a bit of a time lapse from here on until we get to something interesting again. So we are about halfway done here. I think there's going to be one more video on the torso after this one. So just a few more details left. Little holes like this, you probably want to include because they'll cast a nice shadow. If your budget was only like 40,000 triangles, then that's something you would break down. But in this case, I think it'll look cool if we model that in. I think I want more topology on the upper chest because you can see that it looks it definitely is visibly angular. So we are going to want to add, you know, at least a couple more loops up there. That's generally what you want to avoid if you're going for what would be considered modern AAA assets, right? Which is no visible jagged itches, basically. Of course, if you zoom in enough, you are going to see facets sooner or later, right? So sort of, you know, keep in mind that viewing distance. I look more or zoom in to a distance that your screenshots are probably going to be at, right? And that's how you decide if something is faceted or not because if you zoom in to check if something looks jagged or not, then of course, it will eventually look jagged. Another thing you can do is once you set up your test scene and set up some some cameras, some shots from which you are going to do your final renders. There you can take a look and see if you can see shaggy ditches. And, of course, you probably want to do this before rigging. So, you know, you just put your character in there. Tipos for this test render or test setup. But even from a tipos, you can sort of see and guess if you need to add some more topology. It's pretty easy to add more topology. Even after you've unwrapped, you probably do want to rebake if you add topology, because it will probably skew up your UV maps a little bit. But it's usually a quick fix. If you make some minor changes to your model. It's very easy to fix your UVs after you do that. So, you know, you don't have to worry about getting it right immediately here. It's always a bit of back and forth. Now, over here, you can see there is a panel line going straight through the chest there, and I ended up deciding not to include that in the low poly. I have included seams for all the fabric and stuff like that, but I didn't do it for that panel line because I'm not going to use a tiling texture there, and it's all going to be the same material probably. And I don't feel that panel line was deep enough to justify that. I'm talking the left side of the chest there. What's going on on screen is unrelated by the time I stopped talking about that. So here I'm adding another loop around the edge of the chest here. And part of that is to, you know, well, it's mainly, so if you remember, we had the same issue on the pants. When we cut the pockets in, we had those messed up vertex normals in areas where the topology goes a little bit more diagonally and it's near this edge where it curves. And this is the same thing. I'm trying to fix that issue with the vertex normals. It just looks a little bit better if you add these extra loops in around the edges. You can go without, but I find it's always best to add them, not always, but, you know, take a look at your blow poly. If it looks like they could be improved in that way, then add these extra loops. And this part, I know before I said that towards the end I decide to split some parts off. This part stays together, because like I said, these are really close to each other. They're basically there's no gap between these two parts, so there's no reason to split them off at all. And they're both made of fabrics. So again, another reason not to bother spitting them off. So yeah, this is just a lot of cleanup. A lot of looking around the model and seeing if I can see facets or jagged edges that need to be improved, and when I do see them, I add topology in that area basically. When it comes to, you know, the actual polyloops and deformation, you know, getting topology that will deform well for the actual torso, as long as it even quads all the way through, it doesn't really matter because the torso never does, like, super crazy stuff. Unless you are animating musculature and stuff like that, it doesn't really matter. There I just did a little sketch with the snipping tool of what the topology would look like without all the extra cloth folds I did just to compare and to see if I haven't if it all still makes sense what I'm doing here and it does, so not too much change there. You can see the density is higher in the upper chest because there's so much more curvature going on there that you need more polygons to support that curvature without it being jagged. So I'm going through the whole model and welding stuff up that I don't need. That vertex there was unnecessary. Like this one. And you want to make sure that you have edges running down all of the seams on your fabric so you can set up tiling textures later. And when I say tiling textures, I mean, you know, both adding tiling fabric textures in substance painter, because it helps a lot to have it helps a lot to have your basically the UVs for fabric parts to be basically the same as the panels you would actually sew the fabric from because then you can arrange them, and it's really quick to texture fabric this way because you just slap a tiling material on it and you don't have seams in awkward places because all the seams are where they are where they would be in real life. So the seams look logical. The UV seems and the texture seams look logical on the model. I might not be great at explaining that, but it'll be really obvious once we get to texturing. So don't worry about that for now. Just make sure you have edges running down all of the seams on the fabric. Yeah, detaching all the arms and stuff that will get in the way of doing more of this retpper work. Make sure you're not forcing yourself to struggle through, you know, hard to see areas by, you know, not detaching stuff that you can easily detach and then reattach if you need it later. And, yeah, just really making sure you get all of the visible folds modeled in. Don't go crazy with it. Don't add in thousands and thousands of polygons. But just enough to make them look nice on the lower poly. I detached the upper arm there because it was also getting in the way and we can always reattach that easily later. But I think I actually end up keeping that as a separate object because the sleeves actually quite loose around the arm in that area. So it makes more sense to keep it as a separate object eventually. And yeah, you can see as soon as we detach those objects, it's so much easier to work in this area. You don't have to wiggle your camera around all those obstacles. And just adding that extra cut for that concave area there. And taking a look at the low poly by itself, just looking at the outline a silhouette, seeing if anything stands out there mainly. Now, really harsh areas like this with 90 degree angles, you usually want a chamfa around them. Firstly, so they bake nicer because 90 degree angles don't bake very well, and secondly, it will also look nicer on the model because Even if the normal map does make it look right, once you get up close, you do end up seeing that it's like really harsh angle, anyway. So just a little chamf like this can make areas like this look a little bit better. And we do have the budget for stuff like this. So even if it looks like it's, like, Whoa, why are you bothering with these tiny details? This one makes sense. Like, you do want chamfs on these really hardages like this. It'll make baking easier and it'll look better. But, you have to sort out your endons when you do stuff like this, make sure you don't have any leftover. Yeah, starting some topology here to make sure this part actually looks round and doesn't have any fasting. You know, this is a really round area and it's really visible if you have fasting on this boob plate, right? And, um, yeah, I welded up those extra edges on that Shana because, they weren't that necessary. And I'm just moving stuff around here. I probably what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in an extra loop going up here. I ran that through the whole body because it looked like those other areas could use a little bit more topology as well. Since the sides of the torso are quite round, what tends to happen is the sides of the torso get a little bit more topology than the front and the back. And I'm adding a much needed loop to the front there as well. And I play around a bit with adding that seam across the panel line here. I mentioned that a little bit earlier. So yeah, I mess around a bit with a couple of different setups, but I end up deciding to not add it in just, you know, keep these quads nice and even, and I decided, you know, I'm not going to split this part up in the UV islands. A narrow like a thin panel line like this will break down fine, so there's no reason to model it in. And I'm not going to be applying different textures to either half or different materials, I mean, to either half of this object. So there's really no reason to add in that extra edge along that panel line. Even though it does seem very tempting, it does seem like you would want to have an edge along that panel line. And, you know, it wouldn't be bad if you didn't add in that edge, but I decided I don't really need it, so I'm not gonna bother. We're at the 45 minute mark, so it's time to end this chapter, and the next chapter picks up right from here. So see you in Chapter 13. 14. 13 Finishing The Torso Retopology: Hi, and welcome to Chapter 13. In this chapter, we're going to finish up the torso. Since we have all of the main parts in already and a lot of the folds done, this chapter is just going to be a bunch of cleanup and a lot of fiddling around, moving verts around and doing small changes to the mesh while, you know, looking around and checking for jagged itches. So there's not really too much for me to comment on, but if I see something that is worth elaborating on, I'll definitely tune in and let you guys know. But otherwise, I'm just going to let this play through for now. And, you know, as a forward, I'll just, you know, some brief advice would be, you know, when you're at this stage, go through everything, check for jagged edges, make your topology more or less even and neat. But, you know, that also means in areas where there's more curvature and more detail, you know, add more topology. You know, it's a balance of making things look smooth and not jagged and making sure things are even and not too high poly. There's no really hard rules. It ends up boiling down to make it look good, basically. Because there's no real hard rules to this, I can't definitively tell you guys when to do what, when to add more edges or when to add an extra poly loop or weld stuff together, because, you know, it's all vague and it's up to the specific circumstances. So, you know, all I can say really is, follow along with what I'm doing here. Try and apply that to whatever you're working on. If it's this exact character that you're working on for your own project, remember that you don't have to copy my topology exactly. Just try to apply the sort of principles and logic that I'm using for my character here. Okay, that'll be it for now, and I'll chime in with some words if I see something worth talking about. I'm working on these little hard surface details here. And while things like this do break down really well to a flat plane, I think it's nice when they are three D and they stick out or they go inwards and it adds that tiny little bit of extra detail that, you know, it's something you sort of expect from AAA assets, right? So I do think it's nice to model things like this in. Now, this is pretty straightforward. I'm using bells for parts that stick out and also parts that go inwards, because that gives you some control over the width of the extruded part, right? So you don't end up with vertices stuck inside the mesh, and you can more or less get them accurately where you need them to, right? Now, stuff like this, don't worry about it fitting into the rest of the topology too much, right? Don't worry about maintaining the grid here because like I said before, as long as you're adding extra vertices, they're not going to affect deformation too much, right? And this isn't a heavily deforming area, either. Now if you are adding details like this to the very elbow or a part or the knee, a part that stretches a lot, then you would have to think about a little bit, either when it comes to skinning or when it comes to topology, you might want to have a ring around these parts to isolate them to stop them from stretching out because small details like this, it can be really obvious and visible when they stretch out really far. And a way to prevent that is if you have a loop around it, sort of isolating that part, then you can apply an even weight to that entire area. And sort of prevent stretching like this. But in general, it's not something to worry about too much. I think things like this don't cause too much too many issues when skinning. So, if you want to put in that little bit of extra effort and actually model these parts into the low poly, then go for it, right? But maybe if you're short on time or if it's in not a very visible area, then feel free to make it just a flat plane as well and bake it down. It really depends on circumstances and what you're going for in your model, right? Here. So right here, I'm modeling in this little it's a panel line, but it also steps upwards here. So that's why I want to model it in. If there's a thin panel line without much of a gap, and the height difference between the panels is really small or non existent, then there's no real reason to model it in. You might want an edge along the panel line if you plan on applying different materials to those different panels. Or to help unwrapping a little bit. But otherwise, it's not essential to model in every single panel line. Like, I didn't do the panel line across the middle of the boob because I don't plan on applying different materials to either side. So there's no real reason to model that one in. Right here, you can see there's a panel line and it has a gap, and this one I am going to model in because while I can make that gap down, it would look cool if it was three D. It would cast a little shadow, the front panel might occlude the back panel a little bit if you're looking at it from a slight side angle. I'll highlight all of these things once we get to baking and set up the test scene. I'll go through the test scene and I'll point out all of these areas where, you know, I model in these extra details, and I'll sort of highlight how what sort of effect they achieve. And then from that, you can sort of decide if it's something worth modeling or not, right? Because right now, it's hard to tell. I'm just modeling here, and you guys probably, I mean, if you're less experienced, you can't really tell what the end result is going to look like, right? So, yeah, I'll make sure to go through the test render setup, which we're going to do later and point all of these areas out once we get the bake done. So again, this is kind of a tricky area. It's hard to figure spots out like this without making a mess. In general, try to avoid really thin triangles, long and thin triangles. Those will usually cause issues in bakes. Even if it's perfectly flat surface. Well, maybe a perfectly flat surface won't cause issues, but if there's a tiny bit of curvature, it starts to show up on the bake regardless of what you end up doing. There's something about thin triangles you want to avoid. Um, otherwise, little triangles like this aren't really a big deal in areas like this. It's not like you need all quads over here. Try not to overdo it with density because it's kind of wasteful. It looks unprofessional in a portfolio piece, and it's unnecessary, really. Even though polygon budgets are really high, you want to be efficient. So never be wasteful with your polygons. Always try and just use as many as you need and no more. And how many you need is defined by what you want to achieve in the final model, right? If you're making a film asset, then that's millions and millions of polygons, right? But for game assets, right now, I'm aiming for 100,000 for the base body, and then hair and extra stuff like that will be added to the budget. But I'm going for roughly 100,000 plus minus maybe ten, 20%, so, you know, 120,000 tops, probably, something like that. That's my goal, and I'm going to try and stay within that boundary. Again, modeling out this little part that sticks out. And this panel line over here, because the elevation is the same on both sides of the panel line, I'm not going to bother modeling it in. Even though there's a slightly wider gap, that will show up on the normal map just fine. There's no reason to really model it in. But this lower panel, which I'm working on now, you can see it does have quite a big lip, and it's also a curved lip. So I might want to add even more topology here. Aside from that, this is all pretty straightforward, right? Um, This is close to the finished result. You can see from the silhouette, I'm not really picking up on any jagged edges too much now. But you do want to make sure you rotate your model a couple of times and take a really good look at it. Just, you know, see if there are any parts that are sticking out. A really, like, parts where the topology looks ugly to you and stuff like that. You know, don't just blindly rush ahead with modeling stuff. And here, I'm once again adding that extra loop around this area where the shirt transitions to the body because as you saw before, we had that ugly triangulation and adding this extra loop sort of helps even out the vertex normals and get rid of that, zigzaggy shadowing or shading on the low poly. That's about all I have to say right now. You know, this is all stuff you've seen before. I've told you how to use the cut tool and most of these shortcuts, right? So not much more to add here, you know, watch the video and sort of follow along what I'm doing here, I guess. A D. D. D. D the So that's going to be it for this chapter. I've pretty much got all of the torso done here. So, you know, when I come back to this another day and take another look at it, I might see things that I want to change because that's always how it is. When you take a fresh look at things, you notice some things that maybe you do differently or, you know, you'll just end up noticing things that you may have overlooked before. But generally, there aren't going to be any major changes to this torso part, aside from me, splitting off the fabric parts from the mechanical parts. So from here on, I'm going to move on to this neck piece, which is a little bit of work in itself because of that hood part. So I'll see you guys in Chapter 14. 15. 14 Retopologising The Hood: Hi, guys. Welcome to Chapter 14. In this chapter, I'm working on this neck piece type hoodie thing that's going on up here. Now, this is actually a pretty tricky part to do. In fact, I'd say it's one of the trickier parts on this character for me because it's got a lot of sort of areas where you're not quite sure what you should do with them, right? So it sits on the body just above the body where there is a small gap, and it's not a huge gap, but also it's not so small that you could easily model it into the body. So it kind of leaves a question as to whether you should model it separately or model it together. And at this point in the recording, I wasn't sure yet. So even though this part was split off from the body, I still had in mind that I was maybe going to weld it to the rest of the torso. I was just keeping it separate to make it easier to work with for now. Another tricky thing about this part is the actual hoodie part. Now, again, that part's hidden. It's detached from the hi poly and I'm not working on it here right now just to keep things simple for me. It helps to approach tasks one at a time. So first I'm doing the neck piece, and then I'm going to approach the hoodie and then figure out a way to combine them. Now, when it comes to the hoodie, I was pretty sure that I was going to combine it with the neck piece and not have it separate because it doesn't really make sense to have it separate. If I was to make it a separate part, which would maybe be a little bit easier. To model. But you then run into the issue where the point at which the hoodie clips into the neckpiece is in a pretty exposed area, it's going to be quite visible. So it's going to be really hard to hide that seam and make it look natural, right? So I decided that it would be better to have both of these objects as well. They're not really even separate objects in the high poly, right? The hoodie is the hood is stitched into this neck piece. And one of the hardest parts for me to figure out when I was learning red topology is when to make something separate and when to weld it into another object, especially on a character. It's pretty tricky to figure out what's right and what's wrong in these cases. And there aren't too many resources out there, especially free resources. And I think the best way to learn this sort of thing is to watch someone else's full character process, which luckily, you're doing right now. That's how I learnt and figured out how to do it, along with dissecting models from actual games, whether it's just looking at them really closely in the actual game or finding model rips online or ripping the models yourself just to see how all the parts are attached. And from that, you can guess why they made those choices. And, of course, for this tutorial, I'll do my best to explain why I'm making the choices that I do, right? Hopefully, I've been doing a pretty good job of that so far as well. Right now I'm modeling in the folds for the neck piece right here. These are really simple folds, so it's nice and easy to do this, not too much to think about. There's this little lip that forms from the stitching where the bottom neck piece comes up to the top at the front here, so I decided to model that in as well. But yeah, this part's pretty basic cut in the extremities of the folds. The top part and the bottom part, cut them in, use the drag tool to wiggle things into the right place and you're pretty much set. This is pretty much the right density for this part as well, so there's really not too much to think about. Now, in this case, I don't need to worry about the back part so much because there's a hood going over that area, so it's all going to be covered up. But yeah, pretty straightforward. Just adding in these cuts I need. And as always, you need to take a look around, rotate your model around, rotate your camera around to make sure that there aren't any really jagged edges that pop out. Now, I'm moving on to the other side because, of course, this isn't really symmetrical part. So I need to do both sides separately, and it's the exact same process as on the other side. Just using mainly the cut tool here and, of course, the world tool whenever there's two verts that really close to each other. Not really too much going on here. As I've said before, retopo is kind of repetitive, right? And I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle the bottom edge right now if I'm going to weld it to the body or not. So I'm leaving it and focusing on the top surface for now, right? So always just do one task at a time. Don't stress yourself out by trying to figure out three things at once. So if I can just focus on the top part for now, then that's what I'll do. It's a lot easier to break your tasks down into separate parts like this instead of jumping back and forth between that bottom edge of this covering and then the top folds. Yeah, get the general shape in, get the folds in the worry about other parts that come up. Keep things simple for yourself. And again, just using the cut tool and welding where I need to, there's basically nothing else going on here right now, right? Not too many crazy tools or anything like that for an area like this. Make sure when you're working, you're not grabbing vertices through from the other side of the mesh. As always, if you see a little vert popping out in from seemingly in the middle of the face, that probably means you pulled something from the other side of the mesh and should go check either undo or look at the other side of your low poly and see if there is a vertex that's been pulled through to the opposite side of the mesh. Again, these are those tricky folds that don't really follow the flow of polygons, but it's not really too much to figuring them out. You just cut along the edges of the fold, and that's it. I'm not really sure what else there is to say about stuff like that, right? Now I'm working on the top edge because obviously this is a quite thick piece of cloth, so you need to model in both sides of it to achieve that thickness, right? Sort of a weird thing is that middle section is actually a single face, so it doesn't have any thickness to it. So I'll have to see how I'm going to handle that. I might just go back to the high poly and shell it in order to give it a thickness because keeping it as a single plane would mean that I would have to make the material two sided, which is kind of a waste. It would be a waste to make this whole object two sided, and it would also be a waste to just make this single part two sided because it's a tiny part and then I have to give it its own material in order to make it two sided. I think the best option will be eventually to shell that little piece on the high poly. But I'll get to that much later. I'm just rambling about it right now because there's not too much going on on screen for me to comment on. Again, to give thickness to this part. What you could do is use a shell modifier, but in this case, I thought it would be quicker to just select the top loop, scale inwards a little bit, and then extrude it downwards instead of doing the whole process of detaching and shelling and all of that. So I've got most of the neck piece done here. Still a few more things to work out there, but I can move on to the hood for a bit and figure out at least the basic parts of the hood for now. I'm going to keep it a separate object just to make it easier to work with. So we don't have to deal with the underlying low poly that I've already done for the neck. It's always easier to keep things separate if you can. To a certain extent, of course, if you have to switch between two objects back and forth constantly, then that's another hassle. And you can just reattach those objects. So always remember to detach or reattach things whenever things become inconvenient for you to work with, right? Don't be stubborn about keeping things separate altogether. And modeling out the hood, again, pretty straightforward, but this time we're not following any guides for the loops because, of course, this is really nonstandard part, so I can't give you any rules for this aside from keep the polygons flowing along the shape of the object. Keep the quads nice and regular, not too dense, not too small and generally the same size across the whole object. There are exceptions to this, of course. If you have an area that's obscured and never visible, then you either use you either collapse it down to nothing, or you use less polygons depending on if, you know, maybe that area is sometimes visible at some extreme odd angles, then you want to use a few polygons. You probably don't want to leave a hole there or a collapsed down thing. Like the underside of the hood might be visible from some low angles. So I'm not going to completely reduce it down to nothing, right? So I just dragged out a couple strips of polygons along both sides of the hood there you saw. And then I added a few loops for the major landmarks. So that part that comes up from the inside, then the rim of the hood, and then the bottom of the hood and another loop down the middle. And once I've got this rough base down, I can apply a turbo smooth just to bring the polygon up roughly to what all of the other parts are because we do want to have a unified polygon density going through the whole model. It doesn't have to be precise, more detailed areas are going to be denser and flatter areas are not as dense, of course. But, yeah, we want to roughly keep things coherent, right? Now, I'm not worrying about the inner sides or the underside of the hood too much now. I am going to have to do something about those parts, of course, because they are kind of visible still, even though they are, you know, the underside of the hood, you're not going to see a lot of it, but it is still something you need to take care of. So I'm keeping it in the back of my head, but like I said, approach one task at a time, and then I'll figure out that part later. I'm going to have to see about how it's going to weld to the rest of the neck piece. It's a bit of a complex part. Right now, what I'm doing is I'm aligning all of the extra edge loops that were added by tabs moving this whole part, right? And I'm seeing some cuts I can add that go along the shape of the hi poly here. That crease along the rim of the hood, for example, which I'm doing now, definitely makes sense to actually cut into the topology. Because this is such a a sort of a funny shape. It's not exactly uniform. You're not going to exactly be able to keep a really consistent edge flow here, right? So I wouldn't say that's something you have to worry about too much. This hood is not going to deform all that much, so the edge flow isn't super important. Like, it's not going to be the end of the world if this part's kind of messed up. But we do want to keep things professional and looking nice in the Y frame view, anyway. So yeah, try and keep things pretty even here. From here on, I'm just going to be adding topology and cutting those folds in where I need to. So I think I'm just going to let this part play through and get back to you guys when there's something new happening that is worth explaining. So I've got most of the straightforward stuff out the way here. All of the edges and some of the basic forwards are done. Now I'm going to tackle some of the trickier and more problem areas. Folds like this where the creases go deeper inwards are nice to model in and they sort of help get across that sense that it's a modern A character. If you look at characters from older generations, they basically won't ever have these folds that really go over in on themselves and leave that little gap that's still visible. You know, almost always things will be modeled to not result in parts like that because they use a bunch of extra topology and they don't really affect the silhouette and stuff that much. So, you know, when you're really saving polygons, you don't want to do stuff like that. But now when we have bigger budgets, it really contributes to the realism if you do folds like that that are really realistic instead of, you know, folds that are kind of flat and just normal mapped in. So, things like that really add to the impression that it's a AA asset, at least when it comes to cloth, in my opinion. Because when you're modeling the high poly, you can sort of avoid all of these deeper little pockets and issues like that by just going into your high poly and squashing those areas down to make sure that every time you have a sort of gap and thing like that, that it's so close to the surface of the other part of the cloth that you can, you know, not worry about modeling a pocket. And that's what they would have done in the PS three and Xbox 360 era is whenever there's gaps like that, you just squash the high poly together so you can model those two objects as one. But that does take away from the realism because everything ends up clumped together and that's not how things are in real life. Now that we have the budgets for those things, it's nice to leave them out. Even if they do give you a little bit more of a headache when you're doing the retopo I feel like it adds a certain amount of realism, just like all the crumpling we have at the back of the hoodie here as well, where it folds in on itself. So you will notice that this part is probably a little bit more dense than the rest of the body. And that's because it's so close to the face that it's going to show up in all of the renders all of the close up shots of the head that I do, or, you know, sometimes you'll do close up shots of the upper body only. And you don't really want any jagged edges showing up in closer up shots, right? And this is something you'll find in games, too, right, because you'll have little dialogue scenes where characters are talking to each other. And generally, the detail goes like a gradient from top to bottom, right? The head is the most detailed, and then the boots are the least detailed. And if you look at the soles of the shoes, they'll even in modern games, they might still be bixeltd, right? Because that's, like, completely unimportant. So you can keep that in mind. But when you're making nds, don't limit yourself to game ready textures. There's no reason to make your renders look pixelated and low res, just to apply an arbitrary game ready, sort of limitation on your renders because as long as your UVs look nice and your wireframes are good, anyone looking at portfolio piece or something like that will understand you know what you're doing, even if you're using absurdly high resolution textures for your final renders. You want them to look nice. Why would you put all this work into a character model only to use low resolution textures for the renders? Even if it would be what your character uses in a game, it's still nicer to have the textures as crisp as possible. Of course, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here since we are quite a ways off from texturing right now. Still a little bit to go. We still have to finish the retper, do the UVs, do the baking, and then we get to texture, which I think is going to be really fun, especially with this concept. It looks like a nice and easy but really cool result than we're going to get. So moving on to the inside of the hod, I'm not going to go super detailed on the folds in here just 'cause this part is kind of obscured. It's going to be underneath the hair, the whole pony tail and all that. And also, it's behind the rim of the hod, so it's not in a hugely visible area, but I am going to try and get the general shape of most of the folds in, but let the normal map do a lot of the heavy lifting compared to some of the exterior folds that I've done before on this model, right? Because, um, you know, I don't feel like putting a huge amount of work into an area that isn't going to be very visible. So I want to get the general shapes in for all of these just so it bakes nicely. But I'm not that worried about silhouette here because it's not really going to affect the silhouette because it's hidden behind other objects. So, you know, I'm not going to go super low, but I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on the inside of the hood either just because it's a low priority area. Your time's much better spent doing the outside of the hood instead. But for areas like that where you have a bunch of crumpled fabric, all the same general principles apply. It's just a little bit more confusing, and it's a little bit more time consuming getting all those wiki folds in over there. So I've moved back to the outside of the hood here just to clean up this major fold, and because it's got very sharp. Well, the corners aren't actually sharp here. They're quite rounded, but they're really tight rounded corners. So you do need some extra polygons to make that look to make that come across in the low poly without adding jagged edges into your low poly, right? Another thing to make sure to do is that your edge loops are even all the way along, so you don't have the zig zagging up and down. Make sure why I say even. I've said that before in other areas. But in this case, I mean, specifically along edges like this. You don't want the edges zig zagging and getting thinner and wider in areas like this, especially because that'll sort of it will show up in the normal map, too, if that happens, and it'll show up in the silhouette a tiny bit as well. But on the normal map, it will especially show up. But that's kind of hard to explain without demonstrating it. Again, more cleanup on the folds. This is a really prominent one, so I want to do it well, and it's also got a bunch of stuff going on, like twisting in different directions. So I do need to add some more geometry here. And again, the same general workflow applies. You cut the peaks in and you cut the concave part in and then you work from there adding and subtracting what you need. You're always basically relying on the cut tool for this stuff. So, yeah, a little bit more cleanup to go here. We're almost there. Just got to, you know, take another look at all of these folds. I'm sure I left some of these half done, so I have to go through and finish them up. Like this one right here. Just adding that second edge loop to make sure the edge isn't harsh on the silhouette. It's actually surprising what just one extra edge loop adds to the silhouette, right? Um, it's, uh, you know, two edges instead of one really can actually make something look round as opposed to just a pointy triangle. So like I've said, probably a dozen times now, rotate your model around, take a look at the silhouette, and make sure it's not excessively pointy. Of course, we're making polygonal models here, not working with CAD, so there are going to be points and facets on your models, but make sure they're not huge and really apparent, right? Adding an extra edge here because this part looked a little bit stiff to me, and that sort of fold bends upwards there right in that corner. So I figured an extra edge wouldn't hurt here. And an extra edge right at that tip there as well, just to make that roundness really come across. Same thing up here. I think that was left unfinished from before. And I follow those edges right through to the top because that part's also kind of curvy. So it makes it doesn't make sense to reduce it down right before that edge where you can really seal the silhouette So this is all looking pretty good by now. But there still are a few things I need to fix, right, before we can move on. And of course, I've left the underside unfinished for now because I'm not sure how I'm going to connect that into the rest of this neck covering right now. I'm not sure, you know, that's something I'll have to approach once I connect the hood to the neck. For now, I'm just focusing on the exterior really visible parts, and I'm going to have to figure out how it's going to connect to the rest of the neck later on. Best not to, you know, try and do too many things at once, like I've already said before. And yeah, trying to get all of these little divots and creases in. I mean, you don't have to get all of them in. The normal map is, you know, it can carry a lot, but I'm just trying to be diligent here and get as much detail across as I can. I added a little cut there because it seems like the fabric sort of folds that way. So that kind of makes sense in terms of the silhouette. Even though it's really subtle. Something like that probably isn't essential, honestly, maybe even a little bit excessive in hindsight, but it's also not the end of the world if you do add something like that. These cuts I'm adding now are probably I'd strongly suggest adding stuff like this. Like I said before, it makes a huge difference when you have two cuts instead of one going across these very peaks of folds because it really makes them look round compared to how harsh they would be if you didn't add that cut. But as always, the important thing is to take a look at all of this from the side and see if it's really necessary. Again, I'm using all the same techniques I've been using up until now. So there's not too much for me to talk about here. I feel like I have been rambling a little bit these past few minutes, and I can't really come up with any more tips to say right now. So I'm going to keep quiet for a bit again. So working on the interior of the hood here again, and all this jumbled up fabric can be pretty confusing to re topo. It's not really that different to re topologizing all the other parts I've done. But one thing to look out for is, you know, where you have these deeper pockets of fabric, how far down into those pockets are you going to go? Because this is already an area which is kind of covered by other parts, it doesn't make sense to really model out all the way to the bottom of those holes. So I'm just going to, you know, basically make them a lot more shallow than they actually would be on the high poly. Of course, on the high poly, they're not really even holes. I just folds where the fabric folds over in on itself. But it would be impractical to model that in on the low poly and also it wouldn't actually bake very well. Another thing you have to consider when modeling areas like this on your low poly or should I say retapologizing areas like this is if you make parts with small tight holes that close in over themselves or overlap each other. They aren't going to bake very well because you're going to have issues with the cage clipping into other meshes, and you'll have little bits of the surfaces above those areas showing up on your normal map, sort of clipping into it. So even if you do have folds going crazy like that, you sort of have to generalize them and smooth them out a bit and hope the normal map will get them across instead of trying to really model it in because you'll have a bunch of baking errors you'll need to work through otherwise, right? And if it's an area that's not essential and really not going to be up in your face and visible, it's better not to waste your time trying to fix all those baking areas and instead sort of simplify those parts a little bit in the low poly, which is kind of what I've done here. I haven't modeled every last bit in, but the main volumes are there, and a normal map is going to carry the rest for, you know, whatever is going to be visible. I mean, this area isn't going to be very visible most of the time. So these sort of generalized more simple folds will work fine in this area. And a normal map will do the rest of the work here. And of course, if something doesn't quite work in this area, I can always go back and adjust it once I do a test bake. So right now I'm just pulling these extra faces down, and this is going to be as low as this part goes for now, and I'll worry about the backside, the underside of this hood, which really isn't visible at all later on. For now, I'm just going to leave it like this and move on to the next part. And this will actually be the end of this chapter. We've pretty much finished up the hood and the next piece and the neck piece, sorry. And we can move on to another part of the model. I like to jump around a bit and not complete every single part to 100%. Like I said, I think before, leave everything done to 80% and then do a final polish pass on everything together, which is what I will do once we have every single part roughly blocked in. Okay, so that'll be the end of Chapter 14, and I'll see you guys in the next one. I can't really remember what comes next after this, so it'll be a surprise for both of us. I 16. 15 Retoplogising The Arm And Glove: Welcome to Chapter 15. In this chapter, I'm doing the right arm and the gloves. Now, the th thing I need to do here is adjust the low poly of the shoulder that I already did to the newly repositioned high poly arms because if you remember, we spread them out a bit upwards. And I did that low polyp before we did that, so it's slightly out of position. The way I'll do this is to make a soft selection of the bottom part of the shoulder. So I'm going to select the bottom edge loop. And then in the soft selection drop down, I'm going to adjust the fall off to where it's just touching the start of the armpit, basically. And then I'm going to use a working pivot, so you click the edit pivot button to put your pivot where you want it, and then the use working pivot in order to activate that pivot point and have all your transformations be aligned to that pivot point. And I put the working pivot roughly where I rotated those arms from. Now, this isn't perfect. Of course, there's a little bit of cleanup to do here because I was pretty rough with the sub selection, and you're never really going to match the exact transformation I did in Zbrush without having your pivot point placed precisely and having all of your masks in the same place, which is, you know, really not possible to do in three guess max. So a little bit of cleanup like this is okay. This is only going to take a couple of minutes to get all the vertices back into the right place here. And what am I looking out for here is to make sure that the loops that go underneath the armpit are nice and straight and not all messed up like they were before I, you know, went through and cleaned this up, right? So just going through that and making sure these lines are more or less straight and parallel to each other and not all zigzaggy and rough. So you can see this is only a couple of minutes of cleanup, and it's a fairly good way to reposition arms if you have to, you know, just making a soft selection, putting a working pivot point on the joint, and then rotating as you need. That's probably the best way to go about it without having a rig in three S Max. So now that that's done, I can move ahead with the rest of the arm. So the th thing to do is to detach and hide all the things I'm not going to be working on. So this pocket thing on the upper arm, I don't want to touch that right now. I want to keep things want to keep things simple and only work on the arm for now. And I'm also detaching the glove for the same reason. Just want to do the straight part of the arm for now and then worry about the other things next. So detaching and hiding all of these parts. And of course, when you detach, make sure you name things correctly. I don't always do that. Sorry, but I'm a bit lazy about those things, but you shouldn't be, okay? Do better than me in that respect. Um, the way I'm doing the retopo for the arm is just using the extend tool and dragging downwards. For arms and elbows, what I use myself and what I've seen for a lot of games and real time assets in terms of topology is just using a straight cylinder and adding a few extra loops around the elbow area. That's pretty common, and not everyone does a bunch of extra topology for the elbow part anymore, I don't think. So just a straight cylinder with extra loops to account for the defamation around the elbow is perfectly fine. If you have a really pointy elbow bone, then maybe you will want to add some extra topology in that area. But in this case, it's not necessary. And what I usually do these days when I'm doing re topology is just exactly what I'm showing here. Just straight loops and no extra complicated geometry for the actual elbow. No collapsed loops, no extra, you know, uh, inset regions, just straight loops all the way through. I think that's fine. When you have more topology, it can, you know, the weight paints are easier to make for areas like this, so you don't really need to worry about specific topology for areas like this. And it's much the same with the knees as well. Less and less you're seeing specific topology for the knees, but it will depend on what the person working on the asset likes and what conventions the studio working on assets comes to. As always, these things depend. I'm just showing you what I usually use and what I've seen a lot of. Like everything I'm showing you here, I'm basing off my experience and what I've seen lots of other people or studios do. Right here, I'm just aligning that edge to that sleeve here, the seam on the sleeve. And that's usually what you want to do. You want to align edges to seams on your fabrics so you can unwrap along those seams. That's the best way to unwrap fabrics. And I'm just generally evening out all the edge loops on this sleeve because when you extend down from really long distance along a slightly irregular shape, it squashes and moves edges around a lot. And you need to spend a few minutes spreading things out again and making sure that everything's in the right place. You see some of these edges are a little too close to each other and others are a little too spread out. Here I'm just cloning this arm, and I'm going to mirror it, so I can use it as a bit of a template for when I'm doing that mechanical arm later on. And I decided to clone it right now because I'm going to be adding a bunch of details to the side that are specific to the arm on the right side that I'm going to be helpful when I'm retepologizing the arm on the left. So, you know, just cloning it and mirroring it at this early stage instead of having to go through and delete extra unnecessary details. Another thing I could have done was just add an extra eddit poly onto this arm, but, you know, it doesn't really make a difference which one you decide to do. Right now I'm adding a few extra loops to the elbow area. You can see I've made it a little bit more dense. Like I said earlier, you want more loops around the elbow to support all that extra deformation. So something like this amount of density is about right. Now I'm taking a look at this pocket thing and deciding whether I want to model it into the rest of the arm or have it as a separate object. And for now, I'm thinking it's going to be a separate object, but we'll get back to that. So I'm going to move on to the gloves next. Right before I do that, I'll just fix the shading on the arm by applying one smoothing group to the whole thing. And I'm going to hide everything I don't need now and clean up the high poly for the glove, like I usually do, just get rid of all the parts you're not going to need for retopo and loose hanging loops and stuff that'll get in the way. Now, what I'm going to be using for Rtopo here is a base mesh and manually aligning it in three Max. If you want to see a more efficient way to do this, go and look at the bonus chapter called bonus Chapter ZAP Demo. I think that's what I named it, and that'll show you how to use ZAP, which is a really great way of aligning base meshes to your high polymshes. It's like a really great plug in for ZBrush, and I highly recommend it, so please take a look at that chapter. So now I'll input a base mesh for the hand. And this is one from a recent project. I've just taken a chunk of the low poly from there. And I will be providing this file. So you can follow along like that. And the intent here is to subdivide this mesh. For the final poly count we're going to have, and you can see the fingers are quite dense, but you do actually end up needing this much in order to not have angles on your fingers. Now, you can see I haven't done anything for the knuckles here. If this was a bare hand, what I would usually do is inset the knuckles a little bit because usually they bulge out, and you want that show up. So if this wasn't a gloved hand, I'd have this on every knuckle. But in this case, because it's a glove, I'm not really going to do that because there's a bunch of other stuff. There's like these panels, which I'm going to have to highlight, and the knuckles aren't that visible. And the high polycunt will be enough to support good deformation. But, you know, if you're doing a bare hand, just keep in mind that you may want to insert the knuckles just so you can have a little bit of extra curvature. Or, you know, you have more topology to make that knuckle look more, you know, less pointy. So I'm going to scale this hand approximately into position. So quite similar to how we started with ZAP. The only we're basically just going to do what ZAP does by hand. So we're going to shift stuff around roughly into the right position, and then we're going to use the conform tool to get everything perfect. So this is probably about as close as this hand can get. Now we let me get rid of this tubs move. And I'll start using the shift tool to get things. Also, not just the shift tool. I'll use the soft selection actually for now because it'll be a little more at least for this sleeve or wrist area, I think it is better suited for the shift tool. I'm going to scale things. I'll also turn on local local coordinates so that the scaling will basically follow that selected edge loop. And we can sort of get this roughly into position. Of course, we'll have to rely on the shift tool a lot. Now, basically, we're just going to have to try and not mangle the topology too much while we get everything roughly moved into position to where the conforms tools will start working for us. So, you know, try and take your time and not um not sort of mash everything up. Now, we probably should have moved this all down before we started. I think probably the best way to approach this is to have these what do you call them? I don't know. Armpits, the fingers. These parts roughly in place, and then align everything from there. This part is fine. It's better to have it outside of the bounds of the high poly than inside. So for, like, huge things that I'm moving around, like entire digits, I will use the soft selection and I'll also turn on edge distance so that we don't so the selection doesn't bleed across into other fingers. We want it to only follow edges, and I'll turn the fall off to a good number, and we'll just move things into position. And this way, we don't mess up all of the vertices too much. Uh So we just want to get things into a position where we can start using these tools. Because if we start using them here, you know, everything's going to get messed up when we conform. But we can start using the conform tool on this thumb, for example, already. And you can see that works quite well. But if we try this on one of these things, well, that's terrible, obviously. So that's what we're trying to do. What we did for that film is probably good enough. See, this is I would only do this if I didn't have Z RP, and I'm showing you in case you don't you do have ZAP, feel free to skip this part and watch, if you know how to use Z Rp, then you don't even need to watch the Z Rap tutorial. But if you don't there will be a chapter specifically for Z RAP. Again, this takes, you know, a little bit longer than what XRP would do, but you can't get the same result. It it's a little bit more manual work. Okay. Okay. We're getting pretty close now, I think. I think this might almost be workable now. We start getting it to go. I'll add a tubs move on top of this mainly so I can turn the cage on, but also we are going to be using we are going to be subdividing all this for our final topology. Okay, so we've basically conformed everything, but you can see some of these are getting pretty mangled. So that's where the relax tool comes in, and I can basically fix anything that we've messed up without too much hassle. You kind of want to be careful on these parts here, the vertices specifically being crimped inwards to form a nice topology for the inside of the knuckle, where you have a lot of bending. So if we just move over that, then we'll lose all that. But sometimes, you know, if the vertices are messed up in these areas, then you will just have to move and put them back into place later. Okay, so here's our rough pass done. Now we can start sort of getting things better aligned. Now, we don't need this because this is for, like, a wrist, the sort of bone that pops out on the side of the wrist. But we don't have that bone popping out because this is a kind of thick collar of the glove. So I'm just going to delete these and cut straight ahead. And I'm going to think about what edge is going to be aligned to this seam. Because we do want to make sure that we have seams we can cut along in the UV map, so we can apply different materials. So we can tile different materials across because the important thing is, when you're working on these AA tier models, you want to be able to apply tiling fabrics in substance painter. And you want to be able to align it reaction and everything. So that the fabric grain is making sense, basically. And if you don't have a separate UE island for this, then it's a real hassle to do with, like, masks and stuff. So it's always better to have that option. Now, I'm looking at these and I'm not sure if I can align any one of these because they're sort of going across over. So I'm going to leave that for when I subdivide. And for now, I'm just going to get everything into onto the surface, basically. And kind of everything that relates to deformation interposition, and then we'll figure out the seams on the final subdivision. So I'm going to get these knuckles into place. I'm going to make sure the fingers aren't twisted because that's what you can get. Sometimes it's your fingers, the topology will be twisting around the finger if your base mesh is in a very different pose to your high poly. And I'll get the inside of the fingers into position as well. These parts can be a real hassle, so it's a good idea to get them looking nice on the low poly. So it looks like this needs to be a lot close to the corner. Now, let's make sure these knuckle paths. We have three edge loops for each knuckle. Let's make sure they're in the right positions. So I'm going to turn on edge constraints and just slide them along to where they belong. This one seems like it's in the right position. And, yeah, basically, now we're at the point where you would be after doing the Z rap in brush. So let's see that took about 10 minutes. What would have taken, you know, maybe 2 minutes in rap. So all in all, you know, considering that you still have to work on these measures a little bit afterwards, regardless of whether you're using ZAP or not, you know, this isn't terrible, but I prefer to skip it. So yeah, do consider ZAP. This knuckle should be a little bit lower, I think. I can't exactly see on the high poly. Oh, no, I can't. And I'll move this loop along downwards. Some dies just won't cooperate when you're trying to move them along because they're in a different orientation, so they slide up in a different direction. So you'll just have to deal with those manually. Okay, I think we're basically done for this subdivision level. Let's see. You need my need to tweak um a little bit? Okay. Okay. This seems like it's not rotated in the same direction as the actual thumb. In seed, this loop is going in a different direction to the hi polys. I'm going to rotate this whole thumb and we'll redo it slightly. So that seems like it'll be a little bit better. And all of these sort of need moving over along with that, like this. That seems to be a lot better. Though we've got this here. Okay. So yeah, that's more an alignment to the actual thumb. Now let's check the rest of the finger This one seems fine. This one is a little bit off. But I think we'll just be able to fix that by moving around the vertices. And the little finger is twisted the wrong way. Basically, I'm just aligning this to the seam on the glove. So this white ring is always aligned to the viewport. So if you move the viewport, so it's looking head on, then you can rotate without messing too many things up. I want to shift these along a little bit. U Okay. We've got all of our things done. We'll do this hot later. Now I'm going to turbo smooth everything and add an edit poly on top so we can keep working. And this will be our final poly coount for the hand. Okay. I'm just going to conform everything again. Okay. Let's see how many polygons this is. 4,000. Okay. I think that's a good number. Now, this does look a little bit dense, but if you go up to the fingertip, you'll see that you need this much density to not have it be angled. You can see angles, even with this much density. Of course, if you zoom out, you won't. But oftentimes if you have some pose with a portrait and your hand up there for one of your renders and then you have a jagged hand, that's really annoying. I prefer to have the hands a little bit higher Poly. Um, 'cause I really hate seeing pointy fingers. So now I'm gonna line these up with some seams on the high poly. I don't really want to fall into that little gap, so that's okay. From here on it's going to be quite a bit of work just manually moving all these into position. We might move into a time lapse here. So I'm just carrying on, and putting this edge loop along that seam. I'm going to make the hypolyopaqe just so I can see that seam better. Now, it can get tricky when you're doing the very, you know, inner corners of the fingers. So that's why it's a good idea to have your fingers spread out a little bit, not just straight and completely neutral, just a tiny bit, not too much so that, you know, they look weird when they get rigged and posed in a neutral position. But just, you know, there's a large enough gap between fingers here to where I can work. So yeah, this is going to take a couple of minutes. This is going to take a couple of minutes to get all these ts along that line. Looks like we pulled through the mesh. Okay. Try and use the move tool where you can get away with it, where it's not blocking, you know, where it's not going to be affecting other fingers and stuff. You can also check under transform conform options. You can turn on and ignore back facing. That's probably a good idea. Although I haven't found it to really do that much. I'm not sure. But just to be safe, you can mess with those settings and see if they help you. For some reason, the tool isn't working as well as you think it should, but I haven't found much difference. So when you're super zoomed in, you know, you can sort of overthink these little parts, but you zoom out and you realize they're really not that noticeable, not a big deal. Remember to sort of keep that in mind when you're working that, you know, keep scale in mind. Don't overwork areas that are really tiny and not particularly visible. It looks like these parts might be under the surface of the mesh. I'm gonna try and push them out. Mm. That push tool doesn't really seem to be working very well, so I'm just gonna use the shift tool instead. 'cause this is such a tiny object when it comes to, you know, the scale of everything. Looks like, I've got an error here. Hopefully, everything still works. Uh, I Yeah, it does. I don't know what that was about, but, um, I guess it fixed itself. So I'm tending to move these loops upwards. Although, hang on. Maybe I'll take that back we probably just want to continue this one. Yeah. Now we're gonna move this one instead, not, uh that way. So you can see here, these vertices are snapping to the backside of the glove. So to fix this issue, I'm going to go into Zbrush and delete the back faces. Now what we can do is use that dynamesh trick I showed you when I was demonstrating ZAP. I'll go over that again, or we can just delete the back facing polygroups. So let me hop into ZBrush. Okay, I've opened up the Zbrush file. This is remember the one where we've repositioned the arms. So don't go and do this with the wrong file. Unless, of course, um, you never had to reposition the arms in your file, then that won't be an issue. So here's our glove. And, um, all we're gonna do is delete the back faces. By Poly group Island. Now we have subdivision levels. What you can do is you can freeze your subdivision levels. But I'm not going to because sometimes it does give you errors when you unfreeze, if you've done these major changes to the topology, and it takes, you know, a little while to clean those up just with a smooth tool. You know, I'll just occasionally give you a bunch of faces that are all scrunched up and messed up. So I don't want to deal with that, so I'm just going to delete a few subdivision levels. And, you know, this is enough for me to work on retper. I don't need, you know, the highest subdivision level. But if freezing subdivision levels works better for your scene, then do that. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just, it can be occasionally. It doesn't always do that. And it's not particularly major. Although the issue with having too many polygons when you delete islands is sometimes it does leave straight faces around. So I might have to go back and do that anyway. I'm going to see if I can reconstruct subdiv Oh. Okay. I'm gonna have to, um. Hang on. Okay. I'll free subdivlops. And delete them. So yeah, like you saw if you're using Z model and your polygon is too high when you're trying to delete stuff or even, you know, just do operations with a large amount of polygons, you'll get those errors where leave straight faces or if you're doing a different thing like inserting polyloops and it'll mess up the loop. So you need to watch out for that. Um, it's probably just like a rounding error or something. I'm not sure. But yeah, Zola doesn't like it when you have too many polygons. That was probably 400,000 points. So almost 1 million triangles probably. So try and stay under that if you're using Zmula. I think I got everything. If you want to see the back faces of your faces, you can just go to display properties and turn on double. But it helps me to see behind without double turned on. I'm going to leave these edges. Because they won't really get in the way that much of snapping, so I'll leave them. And now I'm just going to export this tool. Actually, I just remembered before exporting, I left the frozen subdivision levels. We want to, um, bring those back. So just click on free subdivision levels again to bring your subdiv levels back. It takes a second to do that. Like so. I don't think it's messed anything up. So we were lucky in that sense, I guess. Yeah. So what I'll do is just decimate this a little bit. And then I'll export it. And now I'll import that glove without back faces, into three D smacks. I must have imported it twice. So where we left that edge, it's still kind of snapping to the back faces, but that's okay, you know, because we do have to basically clean up the whole edge manually anyway. So it's not a huge deal. And deleting all those edges would have taken forever would have been really annoying. So I don't really mind. Just go to set up our opacities the correct way. Not sure what's going on here. Maybe there are still back faces. I? Let me try and hide the faces and see. No. Looks like it's one sided, so that's weird. I guess that just means that I have to do a little bit more manual cleanup. And. Okay, now let's continue moving these over dele a little bit up to the top. And we're almost done. Three fingers out of five. So just a little bit more left. And you can see now that we deleted the back faces were snapping over. To the front. This thinker kind of is getting in a way, but I'm not going to go through and hide stuff because there's only a few vets I have to move until I'm done. Yeah, take a good look from all angles because from here it looks like we got it right in the seam, but you look at it from the other direction and it's not quite there. You have to make sure you take a look at all these things from, you know, spin your camera around to take a look. Make sure it works from all angles. Let's do this part now. Is can get messy. I just have to do it by individual vertex. Okay. I don't want this vertex to go all the way down that little indent where the seam is. I want to a little bit by the side. We can move it over with edge snaps to be right down the middle, but this is small enough to where it won't really matter. I'm not too worried about that. I just want it to be even and straight and very close to the seam, it doesn't have to be spot on at this scale, you know. Okay, that's probably all the hard parts done. It's gonna be a lot easier working with this part. Now we're sort of running into the topology is sort of crossing over, and it's not following our seams anymore, so we're going to have to cut across. Because if we keep doing this, then we'll have to move this loop all the way down there, and that's obviously not going to work. So um I'm going to start having a cut. Now, it might be a good idea to have this a little bit higher up, not right on the knuckles. We've got a knuckle here and knuckle here. Let's try and make that transition somewhere around here in between those two, if we can. Then we'll need to make another one somewhere here. Well, let's try and smooth things out a bit. So see, it's a little bit messy, but it's going to help us texture if we have V seams here. It's also going to help us unwrap. So, you know, it's a little bit of a compromise. And, you know, just because we're adding cuts, that's really not affecting the defamation, because you can add cuts, and that doesn't really change anything. It's just like, you know, if you're subtracting, then that's, you know, going to have an effect. But adding more, I'm sure you can add in such a way that it will harm defamation. But what I did here is not one of those ways. Um, so that's fine. Don't worry about that. I'll move this over so we can get this seam in here. And you see a tiny little gap in here, I don't think you should worry about something like that. It'll bake out fine. I'll just fill it with black when we're texturing it. Let's move these edges over on the fum as well. Okay. We'll actually let's see. Yeah, we'll move all these upwards. Or maybe not that many. Um So we don't want to shift this around too much and have it twisting around all over the place. So it is better to just cut these in. Because if I was to shift this one, actually, now that I'm looking at it, maybe that would be a better idea. Yeah, it's a good idea to follow a loop down and see where it ends up. See, this one ends up in quite a good location for us, actually. So I think I might try moving it up and see how that looks. And if not, then I'll just undo. I'll just relax everything that got bunched up here. And same on the bottom side. Let's see how that looks. We're not too worried about the inner side of the hand being slightly lower poly than the outer side. It's actually a good thing because the outer side is more visible. We can get rid of these cuts I made. M I think this actually turned out a little bit better without any cuts. This seems okay if I smooth things out a little bit more and move them over. So they're a bit more even. And do the same up top. M Yeah, I tend to quibble. Okay. And that's it for the fingers, at least. I want to do a little bit more alignment when it comes to these seams. So maybe we can push downwards a little bit to get this one around the thumb. Now, it won't go all the way around, but part of the way will help. You can probably do something like this. I'll keep that one up there. We'll add some cuts in to capture these folds. Let's see. We can't really do this one. Let me move these over a bit. But I think that's pretty much, I'll probably delete a few of the loops on the fingers because there's a bit too many and we'll revisit the inner sides of the joints as well. Although, actually these look quite good. There might be some minor touch up. But I think what I'll do is I'll move into time laps now. Because I've explained all the fiery stuff. And if anything comes up in time lapse, as usual, there will be speaking segments in the time laps as well. It's not just sped up footage. I do come in and explain some stuff. I think there's something worth explaining in the time laps, but most of it is, you know, more of the same, just moving stuff around or adding cuts, same like you saw me do on the boots and the pants and everything. So yeah, see you there. That's all for this chapter. 17. 16 Retopologising The Gloves Part2: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Chapter 16. In this chapter, we're working on R topo for all the details on the glove. So a lot of repetitive work here. Most of this is going to be just time lapse, and I will butt in with some comments if I see something worth commenting on. But most of this is just going to be time lapsed. As always, you can find the real time versions of time lapsed videos titled, Whatever number the Chapter and Real Time. So enjoy this one and check out the real time one if there's anything that looks confusing. And also, if I see something confusing, I'll try and comment on it in the voiceover. Right now, the main thing I'm doing is making sure that there is an edge running along all of the panel lines on the glove and generally just making sure the polygons are evenly spaced and all snapped correctly to the surface of the high poly. Oh. I Right now, I'm adding in these knuckle pads. So all I really did was align the outer edge around the knuckle pad and did a quick extrude to get that height of the knuckle pad. Typically, if this was ungloved hand, I would inset a little loop around the knuckles, as well. But because this is a gloved hand and the knuckles aren't that visible, it's not so important, so I'm not doing that because The loops around the knuckle area will carry the deformation well enough. So I'm just going to repeat what I did there for all of the different knuckles. Just align the loops to the outer edge of this pad, select all the interfaces and extrude it. And this part's pretty straightforward, I think. A an The no Now I'm doing the retop for the extra sleeve part that pops out of the glove. So this bit is pretty simple. It's the same way you would retop any other part. I just dragged off a copy of the top of the sleeve and conformed it to this extra secondary sleeve. And I'm adding in the extra loops to support the shape, and then I'm going to cut in all of the folds and stuff like that. The only sort of more confusing thing about this part is how I'm going to fit it into the other sleeve. How am I going to connect these two things? I'd say welding them together is a pretty bad idea. It'd be really tricky to get into that little gap, and I don't think there would be any point to that. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cap both of these parts off and just clip them into each other. And that'll look fine. You won't be able to see that deeply down in there. And even if you welded them together, well, what would you achieve by that nothing? So that's my current plan for this part is to just extend it downwards a bit, cap the end off, and cap the end off the inside of the other sleeve end and just clip them into each other. And that should work fine. And that's usually how I attach gloves. I never weld them through the wrist or anything. I just cap the end off and plug it, clip it into the arm because there's not really much reason to weld those two parts together. And, in fact, when you have different materials applied to those objects, that gives you even less of a reason to weld them together and keep them as one object. So I don't have too much more to say about this sleeve part for now. I'm going to carry on cutting in all of these fords and generally getting it up to the final topology I want. And I will get back to this part once we actually cap the ends off and finish this whole area off. So now I'm detaching the top part of the lower glove, and that's so I can shell this part and get the thickness for it done. Before I do that, I'm going to do a little bit of cleanup here with a part that I didn't quite manage to select properly. Now I applied the shell modifier, and you want to make sure you're shelling in the right direction and shell a tiny bit more than you need, just so all the vertices are above the surface of the object. I'm going to go through everything and align it a little bit better. G to get rid of some of these extra cuts I added because they're unnecessary on the inner side. We're not going to be seeing it that much, so we don't need that much geometry in this area. Once again, I can't actually reduce it that much because then it will start clipping through the surface of the outer side. But I can get rid of a few of the unnecessary edges down here. So that's what I'm going to do for now for a little bit. Just get rid of all the excessive loops that aren't necessary in this area. Do a little bit of a cleanup of the topology. Now that I've got it cleaned up, I'm going back to the upper edge here. I'm adding an extra edge loop along the top, just so it's not a rectangular edge, right? By adding this extra edge, I'm making it look a lot more round instead of just a square ending. It's quite subtle, but the hands are kind of a focus point. And I do like the hands to have quite nice topology. I'm also adding in these little cuts or not cuts, but these little corners that result in, you know, the fabric sort of splitting apart here. And I think they'll look quite nice in terms of the silhouette if you actually include this little corner instead of trying to bake over it or getting rid of it in the high poly, right? It adds that tiny little bit of extra detail that makes it feel more believable and not just like it's a polygon object if you include little details like this. So I was a little bit confused here for a minute as to why I couldn't use any of the conform tools on the inner side of the glove. And eventually, I realized that that's because I'm using the glove where I deleted the backfaces as the target. So what I'm doing now is swapping the target out for the one where I didn't delete the backfaces. And that's why it's a good idea to keep all of these extra meshes in your scenes. So, if you ever realize that actually you do need the backfaces for something, you can always go back to it. So here I just swapped out those targets. And I made backface the backface version of the high polyvisible here, so I could better see what I'm doing. And what I want to do now is add a bunch of extra edges to the very rim of the glove. We don't need all of these extra vertices along most of the glove, only the part where it's the very edge because that really shows up in the silhouette. And because this is such a round object, you can definitely see all of the faceting on that very rim, you know, it's really quite a tight circle. And you can if you don't add these extra edges, it will look pointy. You'll see the polygons. And that's kind of what we want to avoid when we're working on AA level acids. We don't want to see individual polygons anymore. We want to give the impression that everything is actually round, it's actually smooth. It's not made of polygons. It's real, right? So that's why I'm adding I think I ended up adding an extra edge every two edges. So that's I think 50% more edges just for the very edge because everywhere else, it's not that important to the silhouette. Down apart from the very rim, you can get away with less polygons. And this is a pretty common technique is only having the very edge of a round object be higher poly, and then the rest of the cylinder can be lower poly. So I'll go through the entire rim here and add an extra edge every couple of edges or an extra da not sure which one applies here, but I'm cutting in an extra little edge, every other edge. And that'll really make this look round and you won't be able to see the faceting unless you get really close. And I'm also making sure to space them all out nicely just to make the most of these polygons and to make sure that they're not bunched up with each other. Now that I've got the edge taken care of, I can go ahead and cap the inner part of the glove off. So I'm just selecting the hole there in hole select mode. And I'm capping, but before I do that, I need to delete the backside of the faces there. And once I cap the hole, I do an inset and collapse. And collapsing the vertices down is perfectly fine in areas that aren't going to be very visible at all. In extremely visible areas, then collapsing can be a bit of a issue because you get a lot of thin triangles and they can bake quite poorly. But for this little hole, sleeve hole, whatever you want to call it, what I'm going to be doing really is applying a dark albedo map to that area and a dark AO. So it'll basically be pitch black down there. Now I'm just welding the top part of the glove back to the bottom part. If you remember, I had the top part detached, so I could work on it by itself without all of the other glove getting in the way and just welding up the extra little stray vets that were left over. And now I'm going to do the top part of the sleeve. So just like the bottom part, I'm using a shell modifier to give thickness. And I'm going to go ahead and clean up the edges. Using the drag tool to align every single word to see where I want it. Now, there's a little bit of a hole in the higher poly there where I tried to delete the backfaces in three DS Max itself, and that didn't quite work out. And then I forgot to undo and it was just left there. I didn't want to bother reimporting the object. So I left it like that. Don't really worry about that hole there. Um Everything else is the same as what I did for the lower glove, lower sleeve, whatever you want to call it. It gets confusing trying to name things that I don't think have a name, do they? I don't think it's very typical to see double sleeved gloves in the real world, but this is all cool sci fi stuff we're dealing with here, so we don't have to worry about that. I'm doing the exact same thing I did on the lower sleeve, like I said before, getting rid of the extra edges, conforming it nicely. Might be a good idea to actually give it a bit more room on the inside. I mean, make it a little bit thicker than it actually is, just so the inner vert sees are from the outer ones. But in this case, I didn't do that. I just conformed it straight down to the surface. There is a little offset spinner right below the surface button on the top tool panel in the free fon panel. You can increase your offset a little bit if you want to conform things but have them still be offset from the surface. That's probably what I should have done for this area, but at the time, I wasn't thinking about it and it's not really going to affect the final results, so it's fine. Now that I have it all cleaned up, I'm trying to figure out how to marry it to the rest of the glove. So for now, I decide to cap the in a haul off as well, just like I did for the lowest sleeve of the glove. Same exact way, selecting the outer rim, pressing cap, then insetting it and collapsing those vertices. Now, I will end up changing this in a minute. But for now, you know, it's good to try one thing, see how it works, and then try something else later on when you have a better idea instead of just sitting there, staring at your screen and just thinking about it. Usually, what I would say is just try it, see if it works, and if it doesn't try again. What I'm also doing here is I'm dragging the outer side of the sleeve, the upper sleeve and clipping it down into the cap of the lower sleeve. But I do end up working on these areas a little bit more and changing a few things. So keep your eyes peeled for that. Right here, I'm just fixing the vertex normals really quickly with the Edit normals modifier. So you just add an Edit normals modifier and click Unify with all of the normals selected at that point. Right now I'm doing a little bit of cleanup here. I'm trying to align the edge loops of the outer sleeve and the inner sleeve, just to make sure there's no clipping going on when the wrist bends. It helps to have all of the edges aligned of the inner and the outer parts. I'm not going overboard with this. I'm trying to be roughly as close as possible, but it can be a little bit tricky, especially because there's a little bit of gap between them depending on your camera angle. I can look like you've got them spot on from one angle, and then you turn the camera a bit upwards, and you realize that they're actually still kind of off from each other. But either way, what I've done is I've turned on edge constraints, and that lets me drag edge vertices up and down freely without messing up the she too much. And I'm trying to align the vertices on the outer layer and the inner layer so that they're in the same spot to see each other. And that way, when the wrist bends, there shouldn't be too much clipping between either mesh, the inner or the outer mesh, and that's what you want to avoid. You don't want your inner meshes clipping through the outer ones. And that's how you do this. That's how you would do like a jacket going over a shirt and all sorts of stuff like that, as well. Luckily, we only have to do this for a tiny patch. In games where a character can take off or put on clothes like a jacket, then sometimes you have to do stuff like this or in RPGs or anything that has layered pieces of cloth, then you have to make sure that all of the seats between meshes are aligned more or less to each other. I'm revisiting the bottom of the upper sleeve here a bit. I feel like I can improve this somewhat. I'm pulling all of the bottom open edge down a little bit. So it clips further through that cap there. And so it's more even. It's straighter, and it's aligned to an edge loop on the lower glove. So what I also want to do instead of having two caps, which doesn't entirely make a lot of sense now that I think about it is I want to have both of these edges just clipping through that cap at the bottom there. So what I'll do is I'll turn on vertex snapping. And snap all of the inner vertices to the outer ones. So just going through the entire edge loop now and snapping them all downwards to the lower to their outer counterpart. And once I've done that, which will take a couple minutes. Just going to wait until it finishes here. Now that's done, what I can do is I can select the inner edge loop. Just go to edge mode and double click on that inner edge loop and I can scale it down a bit, a tiny bit. That gives me the exact result I want. I want both of these edges just clipping through there, but I do want to maintain that thickness. This is probably the fastest way I could think of doing this part. And I feel like it was pretty efficient and it gave a good result. I feel like that might be a pretty neat trick to know. That about covers all of the more interesting things in this video. I don't think I have too much more to add with voiceover. From here on it's just going to be a little bit of cleanup, maybe aligning some vertices, maybe checking if some vertices are clipping through a surface or doing a little bit more retopper work on a fold or something, but not really anything you haven't seen before. I'm pretty much checking out here. I don't think there's gonna be any more that I'll be adding in terms of voiceover. I I I So that's going to be all for this chapter. I've pretty much finished up the gloves here. There's going to be a little bit of adjustment I'll have to do for the glove on the left hand side because it's slightly different, but it's not too bad. So that's all for Chapter 16. See you in the next one. H. 18. 17 Retopologising The Mecha Arm: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Chapter 17. In this chapter, I'm working on the mechanical arm. Now, hard surface object re topology is a little bit different to soft deforming objects. We don't have to follow all the rules on clean edge flow for nice deformation, since these objects don't deform, they're hard. So the entire object is weighted to one bone 100%. So there's no flexing, so we don't really need that clean edge flow for defamation. Instead, what we're looking for is nice crisp edges to make it look like it's hard surface and a really nice clean bake, especially if you're making something very glossy and metallic, then a super clean normal map is really important for that. Now I'm going through my Zbrush file, so I can export out the low subdivision level, which is typically what you would use as a starting point for the topology of a hard surface object. You take the low subdivision level and you optimize it, remove supporting loops that aren't necessary for the actual low poly, and then add maybe some chamfers or other details that aren't there in the low subdivision level, but are present in the high poly. So yeah, generally, for hard sulfa topo, your starting point is the lowest subdivision level of the high poly, but it depends on the exact workflow you used. In this case, this workflow works fine. So I am unhiding all of the parts of the arm right now, just going through the list of subtols and unhiding them. And I'm setting them or low that button there on the right side of the screen. And you might want to see the wire frame of all of your subtols at once, and there's no real way to do this in Zbrush. You can only see the polyframe of your selected object. What you can do is render, but that disappears as soon as you rotate your camera. Instead, what you can do is apply a frame mat cap to your you know, turn on the frame MTCAp and that sort of slightly shows the wireframe for you. It's not perfect, but it does give you an impression of how dense some objects are. And, you know, you might want to do this if you want to export if you want to mess with the subdivision levels to make sure everything is around the same density. But I didn't do that. I just decided to export everything as it was. So now I'm using the FBX export in order to export all of the visible subtols and I'll import them into my now I'm taking all of these imported meshes and I'm putting them in their own folder. And that's usually how I like to organize things like this where, you know, if I went through all of these objects and name them individually, that wouldn't really help me that much because there's no real good way to name these parts. I mean, you could name the forearm and the upper arm, but then there's all these extra bolts and stuff where, you know, it's going to be bolt one bolt two. That's not very helpful. So I find that just putting everything in its own layer, gives me, you know, I might take me a couple seconds to flick through a few different objects, but I end up finding everything I need really fast if I just put it into a layer. Now, I'm going through all of the meshes and seeing if they're usable or not. Some of these, even at their lowest subdivision level from Zbrush aren't that low and aren't that usable. Others are better and more okay. So I'm just sorting through everything I just imported and taking a look at what's good and what is. So for example, this upper arm sort of metal or whatever it is, it kind of looks like a piece of armor that goes over the mechanical arm. This part's quite good. It's it's a bit of a lower subdivision level or lower density than I need, but that's okay because then I can just add in the extra loops. I find that it's a little bit easier to add topology than it is to subtract. And for all of these parts where we have curves, you end up adding in way more topology than anywhere else. And a good way I find of doing these curves is just cutting them in and just using the normal transform Gizmo to move them into position as opposed to the conform tools like you saw there, because the conform tools sort of scrunch them up. Whereas if you get it really close into position with the transform Gizmo then I find it works a little bit better. So while we do want to maintain a similar polygon density to the other body parts we've done, since hard surface parts are a little bit different, they work a little bit differently to deforming parts. Don't be too worried if the parts around the very edges, the curves are a little bit denser than everything else you have. And also, likewise, the flat parts, you can make a lot less dense since they're not deforming. If you want to, you can just collapse everything down in perfectly flat areas. Sometimes I like to add in a few extra edges to those areas just to avert baking errors. But that's also something you can play with once you're actually doing test bakes and seeing how the bake works out. So again, to reiterate, I like to just add in cuts and then use the transform gizmo to move these edges into position. I find that's the best way to approach these parts. And for now, I just want to clean up this low poly object by itself. I'm not too I'm not really thinking about how this is going to plug into the other parts. This part's, you know, more or less separate, but I am going to have to figure out a way to weld it down to all the other parts because I don't want to have, you know, 20 different objects in the arm area. That seems like a little bit much. It would be a nightmare to rig, I think, and all those little gaps in the low poly end up looking kind of bad if you have all these little gaps, and all the tolerances are slightly different just because of how, you know, polygons end up looking a bit jagged in those cases unless you use a ridiculous amount of vertices. So a lot of these parts, I am going to weld together. But some are going to be separate, like the upper arm, the forearm, and probably the round part in the elbow. That's what I have in mind to be separate right now. But yeah, for now, I'm just cleaning up this forearm plate or whatever you want to call it. And I'm not too concerned about all of the other pieces. So for the next few minutes, I'm just going to go around this entire object and add extra cuts to these edges and then move them into position with the transform gizmo, just so all of these round parts actually look round and smooth and not pointy and polygonal. And in some places where there's really tight curves, I might end up having to add in quite a lot of topology, but that's acceptable because it really matters to actually have your low poly conform closely to the high poly in curved areas when it comes to hard surface objects because that stuff really shows up on bakes. So while you do roughly want to maintain the same polygon density as the rest of your body, keep in mind that this is a hard surface object, and the round parts do need a little bit more than you otherwise would have on soft surface objects. So I'll just keep doing this for a little while, and then I'll chime in when there's something new going on. I think I'm pretty much done with this part. Ready to move on to the next one and that's going to be this cylindrical detail around the back above the elbow and it has the opposite problem of the first armor piece in that this one is too dense and there's a bunch of edge loops I need to get rid of. That's really quick and simple and just double click and control backspace to get rid of them. I'm leaving a few edge loops in the middle because this isn't perfectly straight. It curves and bends inwards a little bit in the middle section. I've left a couple loops to cover that. I'm getting rid of every other edge loop here as well. And something like this seems like about the right density. It does have to be quite dense in the horizontal direction just because this is a cylindrical detail. It's very round and round things always need more topology to end up looking right. Now, I'm moving on to the bottom part of this detail thing and just deleting the interfaces, which aren't ever going to be visible, so I don't need them. That's another thing you have to do when you are adapting low subdivision models to act as your low poly. Of course, when you're modeling stuff, you tend to model more than is actually visible, just as good, just because it's more convenient to model that way. You're not going to be getting rid of all every single backface as you model along. So, yeah, deleting backfaces is another thing you have to do when you are doing this workflow. So, I probably could have not worked on the bottom edge of that first armor panel since I had to go ahead and do the same thing for this piece as well. But, you know, hindsight is 2020. What I'm doing now is welding that top piece down to this bottom one. And I tried to do that just with one click with the bridge command and selecting both edge loops, both edges, but that didn't quite work because it's, you know, there's a different number of edges on both sides, so it ends up welding diagonally and messing all of that up. So, and I had to go in and do it individually, which, you know, it can seem annoying, but when you really think about it, it takes like a minute to do this. So, you know, while sometimes you do feel like there's a smarter way to do something, sometimes it's just quicker to do it the dumb way and get it done with instead of play around with the edges and trying to bridge them all at once. So I guess don't be afraid to do things a dumb way if you really feel like you have to. Don't spend hours messing with all the tools just to get them to work the way you want. Next up, I moved on to this little panel here, just because it looked nice and easy and a quick thing to do. Quite similar to what I did for that little cylindrical detail around the back. Of course, deleting the backfaces here and all the extra edges. Because this is a kind of irregular shape. You have to be a little bit careful and think about you're doing. When it comes to cylinders, it's like you don't even have to think. You can just select every other edge and be done with it. When it comes to regular details, you have to pick and choose what you're getting rid of, really. So I'm only getting rid of the internal edges and leaving all of the external ones that actually affect the silhouette, because I do actually need to keep those, but when it comes to internal geometry that has a lesser effect on the silhouette, you can easily get rid of it, and it'll look exactly the same on the low poly. So something like this seems to be working, I'll spend a few more minutes cleaning up the edges of this part, and I won't be insetting or doing anything for those two bolt holes or details you see there at the front of this piece. Since they're inset downwards into the surface, they're not affecting the silhouette, and a normal map will display these perfectly fine. There's no need to model them in. The process for this part is going to be much the same. I'm just basically going to be adding in a few extra loops for these curved parts that for now, they're quite polygonal and jagged and deleting the back face. The only difference with this part is that there are those two sort of protruding little bolts or details here, and I will be modeling those in because it would be quite nice to have them showing up on the silhouette. I think it's a really nice detail and it'd be a shame to just bake it down flat. So what I'm going to do is sort out all of the edges first and then model those in. And there is a little trick to doing round details like this, so stay tuned for that. A Right here I'm just detaching the high poly of this little panel so I can isolate it and work on the little part that's protruding and underneath the cylindrical detail above the elbow. I couldn't quite reach it without detaching this part from the high poly. So, you know, this makes it a lot easier to work on this part if it's out in the open and isolated, so I can work on it alone. Now I'm going to do these two round bolts, and this technique will work for any round detail you have. So the first step is to cut around it with the cut tool, just a rough circle. You don't have to be very precise or really try hard to actually make it round here because we're going to use a tool to quickly make it perfectly round. So roughly get those vertices in around your detail and delete any internal edges. So it's just an endgon. Select that face and click Geo Pool. And Geopol will immediately make it a perfectly round angon, but it only works if there are no internal edges in your shape. So if there were any edges inside the shape, even if I did have all the faces that made up that circle selected, Geopoly wouldn't work. That's why I had to delete that edge that was running through the middle of them. I'm just going to use a few cuts to get rid of the engons around this shape I cut in and then use bevel to actually build out the three D detail. And roughly shift it around and insert it again, just so I can get that extra second little bump in. I think it'll look quite cool if I manage to get that in the low poly. So, yeah, that's how you do circular details. Geopol is really good for stuff like that. So I'm going to do the same thing on this little bolt. Now, it's a good idea to settle on a bit of a convention on how many sides you use for details like this on your model. So, you know, for a certain size of detail, you might choose to always use 12 or 16 sides. In this case, I kind of forgot to count and didn't pay attention. So all of them have a random number. It's not actually going to affect really how it looks in the end, but I feel like it's good practice to sort of standardize things and use one number for all of them, but it won't actually really affect anything. I feel like it's just good housekeeping to do. Again, same thing, cutting things in when you use Geopoly, of course, it will circularize your selected faces, but they might shift to the side a little bit because it will average to the average position of all vertices. So you might have to use the transform gizmo to move it back into place or rotate it a bit. So it lines up better with the surrounding topology for you to triangulate it and get rid of all the endons around it. Now I'm just using bevel like I did on the other side, and I'll bevel it once, insert it and bevel it again for that second little detail that's popping out there. Yeah, this is how I handle secular little details like this. So now I'm going to try and attach the cylindrical detail to the larger part over here. And the first step of that is cutting around the whole detail. And that'll give me points to weld two pretty easily. So once I've cut the silhouette out onto this larger part, what I'm going to do is delete all of these faces. And now I can weld. Now, this is a bit messy and the way these parts fit together isn't ideal. There's a bit of a gap here, and also the gaps kind of uneven, so I'm sort of not super sure about this part. I think I would suggest going back and editing your high poly a bit if you run into an issue like this in order to make the gap even or get rid of it entirely. So you don't have questions like this. And also, you'll see that there's some pretty troublesome areas where it's hard to reach, and well, you'll see. So yeah, just trying to weld this into the existing topology. Of course, I moved I'm going to have to go through and conform these parts down a little bit because I moved some stuff around while welding. But yeah, the gist of, you know, welding parts to each other in cases like this is you want to cut out the silhouette on the object you're welding to, and then that lets you delete the faces and gives you a good position to start welding from this edge, up at the top, it's kind of confusing point where they clip into each other. Kind of tricky to figure this out. But, you know, I just accept that it's going to be a little bit messy in this area. And I just sort of let it be like that. Now, I did leave the backface of this cylinder detail because it is quite far from the surface of the arm, and it definitely will be visible, or it is possible to be visible from certain angles. Now, if you're really set on a certain if you already know how you're going to render your thing, and you know, it's definitely not going to be visible. You can go ahead and delete faces like this. But obviously, that won't really be game ready now, will it? I'll just sort of be a real time render. I'm going to try and make this game ready. So basically, I'm doing everything here as I would if I was working on a game, not just for a render. So in that case, I need to make sure my model looks good from all angles. So even if this part wouldn't be visible if I was just making a render for my portfolio, it would be visible at some point in a game because your character does all sorts of crazy stuff in a game, so it is quite tricky to figure out how to integrate these parts into each other. You know, especially with gaps like this, I'm going to have to cut in an extra little loop to support that gap there. That starts towards the top. Over on all the other side is actually quite straightforward. But, yeah, when you're doing a hi poly, try and think ahead and avoid parts like this if you can. In this case, I just decided to go with it. I really couldn't be bothered to go in and edit the hi poly. And this didn't take me too long in the end, but it's something to know and think about when you're doing your hypolymdels. So you can see I am modeling in that little gap that results over here. And there's nothing really complicated to it. It's just adding in cuts and topology to support these kinds of things. I'm going to have to spend a few more minutes trying to figure out these little corners and gaps here. It's just a lot of cutting and using the rank tool to try and get the vertices into a place where it makes sense. Try and avoid, like I always say long thin triangles and try and avoid putting too much topology in that area to the point where it doesn't really make sense. You don't want to be putting hundreds of vertices or polygons into a corner like this. So try and keep things like this efficient and you know, make as much sense out of the nonsense as you can, right? Now, again, here behind this whole cylindrical detail, I have another sort of problem area. Now, I don't think unless you actually go ahead and change the design entirely, something like this isn't exactly avoidable. If you have overlapping details, well, you know, three D artists often don't really like stuff like this because it's a real pain to model. So you could change the design in such a way that this sort of cylindrical detail looks more like a separate component, and it just clips onto the surface. That would make this a little bit easier. But if this detail, you know, by design has to be attached to this, upper arm part like it is here, and, you know, that's how it is in the concept, and that's how you're meant to do it. Then there's not really any other way around it. You just sort of have to struggle with the camera and try your best to weld stuff up here. Now, the good thing is, is that since this isn't very visible, even if you do a terrible job in an area like this, it's not really going to no one's really going to see it, right? But all of the same rules apply here. You know, try and keep your quads even and um you know, the main issue with areas like this is fighting with the camera and visibility. And when you rotate your view, it's very easy to get confused in areas like this and end up not knowing what you're even looking at anymore. Um. Again, this little corner here, I have to cut in and wells too. I mean, I wish I had some insightful commentary on how to handle areas like this, but there's really nothing to it aside from just going ahead and modeling it in. That's all I can say, really. It is tricky because it's behind another object, and it's hard to see and reach in there. But, you just got to do what you got to do, right? So I'll be spending a while trying to sort this area out and make it make sense. Now I'm moving on to the arm piece that is underneath all of these extra armor parts. So I'm deleting all of the faces except for the top edge because all of those faces are underneath the armor parts, so they're pretty much useless to me, but this upper edge is a good starting point. What I try to do here is I turn on vertex ticks on the part that I already did and that will make the vertex ticks show up all the time, even when I'm working on a different object. The reason I did this is I thought it would be a bit simpler if I aligned and extended out all of these edges with this part being separate and not attaching it to the outer armor plates or whatever you want to call those. I thought it would be a little bit simpler to work this way without attaching everything, but eventually I decided that's not worth it and I can actually just attach these parts and work on them this way. I turned vertex ticks off again because I find them a little bit annoying when I don't need them. And this is the same regular old workflow, just dragging stuff around and bridging this big gap, which is actually pretty quick and easy. Just edge to edge bridges, wherever it makes sense. You can see that the outer edge that I took from the lowest subdivision model I imported is coming in pretty handy. It's really quick to bridge to it and I didn't have to go through all the effort of manually modeling all of that stuff. Now, there's a little bit of cleanup I have to do here. Which takes a few seconds. You can see because these parts are right on top of each other, it doesn't make sense to have them as a separate object, does it? Because, it would be a waste of polygons, it would be a waste of texture space and all that. That's why I decided to merge all of these objects into one. Now, areas like this, it can be a little bit tricky to merge because you've got this stepping going on and it's hard to decide whether to model that in or not. I would say it's not in a super visible area, so you don't really have to model that step or that gap in, the normal map will handle that just fine. Since it's not in a super visible area, I don't think it's worth spending a huge amount of time on. Sometimes the cut to can be uncooperative. That's just how it is. It's a tiny bit buggy as all things are in three S Max, but that's something you'll find with all three D software I found. I'm always running into tools that aren't very responsive in Blender and Maya and Zbrush. All of these software have these issues just because they're so big and they're doing so many things and three D is complex. It's just something you learn to live with it all these unexpected behaviors, I guess. Of course, that's not to say some are better than others. So aren't better than others. There's definitely a good reason for having different preferences to different software. I like three Max. Some people don't is what it is. It depends on what you learn first sometimes, but it's pretty easy to switch softwares if you really need to or you want to. I could switch to blender in just under a week really if I wanted to. So just clearing up these engons here. I do want to cut this panel line in because it's quite deep. It probably does it would be nice to have that cut in. But before I get to that, I'm going to clean up this little area up here. Cutting in this panel line is pretty simple. As you can see, I'm just cutting out the outline for now and making sure everything is aligned with that outline. Once I've done that, I can just cut straight down the middle. Or if I don't want to cut all the way down the middle, I can use Alt one and do a quick loop cut and slide as well. That works too. You can see that's how you quickly cut in a panel line. This top part of this arm is cleaning up quite nicely now. So it's going to be a lot of this same process of bridging parts and welding them. And if there's another panel line, I'll be cutting that in too. But I think that little spot there gives you the gist of what I'm going to be doing for this whole area. That's all the commentary I have for now. So I've got most of the work done on the upper arm. There's still a little bit of cleanup I'm going to have to do, get rid of a few engons and I have to fix the vertex normals, as well. But that's going to be all for Chapter 17. And in the next chapter, I'm going to carry on a 19. 18 Retopologising The Mech Arm Part2: Guys, welcome to Chapter 18. In this chapter, I'll be carrying on with work on the mechanical arm. First thing I'm going to do is fix the vertex normals with the edit normals modifier, just so I can tell if I've got some duplicate vertices or unwelded points on my mesh, and just so I can see what it looks like really instead of seeing a bunch of errors. And I'll cut these little or rather model in these little bolts that are sticking out the same way I showed you guys in the last video using the Geopoly tool or button. And then beveling them out and beveling them again for that little second extrusion you see here. So a lot of this video is going to be the exact same stuff you all saw in the last video. So right now, what I'm going to be doing is going around this mesh and doing all of the bolts that I haven't done already. And for each one, it's going to be the exact same process. Now, one oversight, which I actually mentioned in the last video as well that I made here is I didn't really pay attention to how many edges I gave each of these bolts or, you know, rounded details, whatever they are. So they all have not all of them, but some of them have a different number of sides, which, while it's not actually going to affect really the visuals or the quality of the final model, you know, no one's going to be able to tell if this little detail has 16 or 12 or how many faces really but it's just, like, you know, slightly unprofessional. Now, maybe I shouldn't admit to this when I'm giving you guys a tutorial, but it's just a word of advice. If you are making details like this, you probably should stick to the same number for a huge detail that's identical in size, at least. But again, it's not actually going to affect really how it looks at all. It's just it's good practice is all it is. So yeah, count in your head when you're making the cuts. 16 actually, maybe 16 is a bit much. It doesn't really matter, but usually you want a multiple of two for round things. And in general, people prefer multiples of two pretty much all the time when you're modeling. Unless it's something symmetrical, then you go for an odd number so you can cut it straight down the middle. So yeah, that's all I have to say in terms of these bolts and these details. Now I'm working on the shoulder, and what I'm going to be using for this is if you remember, I cloned and mirrored the right low poly arm when I was working on it, and that will be what I'm using as a base for this shoulder. I make a quick clone of that arm just in case I want to go back or use it for something else. And now I'm using the push and pull tool to push all of these vertices above the surface of the high poly, and that will make the conform tool work a lot better because if you use the conform tool on an object that has a thickness to it. So it has two faces, one facing outward and one facing inward. It's pretty common for your vertices to snap to the interfaces instead, and that's not useful at all. So by pushing all the vertices above the surface of the hi poly, the conform tool works a lot better and just conforms downwards to the outer surface. Now I'm just doing a little bit of cleanup. I'm splitting apart some of these high polypts. As you can see, they're all attached to each other for now. So I'm going to go through and detach them from each other a little bit. And that will give me more freedom in terms of what I want to see. I'll be able to hide parts that I don't want to see or unhide them as needed. You can see it's quite useful to be able to see this arm without all of the armor panels getting in the way. Another thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on vertex ticks on the low poly of the torso that I've already made, and that will let me line up the vertices on the shoulder to the vertices on the torso. To turn on vertex ticks, right click on on Object. Go to object properties, and you'll see a tick box for vertex ticks. Don't worry about that button for now. Click Okay, and you can see your vertex ticks show up, and they're visible no matter which object you select. And that's useful for lining up the vertices of one object to another without having to attach them together. You could press F three to turn on your wireframe. But the problem with that is the wireframe for the high poly also shows up and you won't be able to really see anything that you're doing through that wireframe because it's so dense. Now, all the vertices for the shoulder and the torso should line up because they do line up on the other side when I made them, and I have tried to maintain the same topology for the torso on both sides. You know, aside from little details like that little pop up bump detail on the torso there, of course, those won't line up. I'll have to model those in a bit later, but all of the main edge loops should line up. And that's why it's a good idea to maintain continuity through your model. Because even though both sides of the torso are quite different. One side is, you know, mechanical and there's a bunch of extra hard surface details going on there. It's a good idea to maintain the same edge lefts, because then it's a lot easier to work on the arm or other details that you might be carrying over from the other side and stuff like that. It's just a good idea to maintain some sort of cohesion and continuity through your whole model. And really, it's mostly it's a mark of professionalism, right? If you've got if everything's cohesive and you're following sort of a convention on how you're approaching things on your model. Now I'm deleting the lower arm because I won't be using that at all. I'll be using the lowest subdivision level that I imported from Z Rush. Now moving on to the armpit. I want to hide this little armor piece that goes over the top, just because it'll make it easier for me to see what's going on with the armpit. And I'm going to go ahead with moving all of the topology into the right place on this armpit area. So again, lining up the vertices with the ones on the torso. And just getting everything even and into place. Now, of course, this arm is quite different in shape to the other one, but because this is a sort of, you know, topology can be quite flexible. There's nothing special we need to do for this arm. Everything I did on the right arm will work fine for this one. It's just a matter of moving things around and evening them out. So I'm just spending some time moving all of these edges into the right place. As you can see, they lined up perfectly with the ones on the torso. So it's like the same exact number of edges and loops, it's just a matter of getting them in the right place. And I'm only using the shoulder area for this, and I will be welding it into the top part of that arm that I already did. I just want to get all of these loops right for the armpit area right now. And then I'll see how I'm going to be attaching this to the parts that I've already done. And as always, it's a good idea to compare the different sides of your model to see if you're doing the same things on either side. It's always great to have that reference. So I'm not sure if I already told you guys about this software Pure ref. It's great for having your references up on screen. I'm not going to go through all of the shortcuts because I don't actually know a lot of them. If I ever need to do something and I don't know it, you can just right click and go to the settings menu, and you'll find all the key bindings there for everything you might need. It's got a bunch of, you know, options for manipulating your reference images. You can mirror them, flip them, spin them around, scale them. And there's also a bunch of visibility options for the actual pure ref window to have it always stay up on screen on top of your active window like I'm doing right now. There's a little bit more cleanup to go on the shoulder. I'm going to move some of these loops upwards a bit because you can see they're slooping downwards, which isn't ideal right now. And I'm going to go over and smooth things out a little bit. Just a little bit of adjustment to make things make more sense. Since I'm pretty much done with the cleanup of the topo for the upper shoulder part, now I'm going to start welding these parts to each other. I already went ahead and lined up the vertices of the shoulder and the lower arm while I was cleaning up the topology on the shoulder. So I don't have to do that now, but I do still have to delete some of the topology that is overlapping. You can see some of this shoulder topo is unnecessary since I already have those areas covered by the retopo I did for the lower arm armor part. So I got to delete those polygons, move a few of these vertices around to line them up and also cut in a few extra edges in the armpit area to have something to weld and to be able to, you know, match these parts up. So pretty straightforward, just as always using the cut tool and deleting some stuff. So nothing really to talk about here. I so I've pretty much figured out how I'm going to weld the shoulder to the upper arm piece. But something I sort of forgot to check along the way is how this matches up to the torso. So what I'm doing here is hiding all of the parts I don't need with the hide selected button. All I really want to see is the loop around the arm hole. So what I was focusing on was matching up the shoulder to this lower arm piece, but I didn't think how the torso works into that. So I've done a little bit of unnecessary work here. But, you know, these things happen. It's never going to be a perfectly efficient process. So you can see here there's a little bit of clipping going on here, so that means these faces aren't entirely necessary. So I'm going to get rid of them and sort of think a bit more how I'm going to attach these two pieces together. Now, you can see we have a little bit more density in the polygons on the arm piece, and that's largely because, like I've said before, it's a hard surface part. So if you have hard for hard surface, you kind of need a little bit more topology around edges to make them actually read as smooth metal pieces compared to organic stuff, you can get away with less polygons actually when compared to hard surface stuff. So now that I've got, you know, I can see all three parts at once, I can get a better idea of what I should be doing in this area. I can see how the shoulder connects to the torso and how the torso interacts with this upper arm area and what the sort of tolerances are and what's overlapping what. So you want to make sure that you have all the information you need while you're working in order to be able to make these sort of decisions, right? Don't Yeah, it's probably a bad idea to do a lot of work with a bunch of parts hidden and to then later realize that actually, this doesn't really work with some of the parts that you had hidden and weren't paying attention to. Like you can see here some of this armpit topology. I kind of made needlessly because it's all hidden under these parts that I've already done, and it all clips into the torso, so there's no reason to keep it around. But again, these things happen. So, you know, if you end up, like, wasting a bit of time doing this stuff, don't feel too bad or don't get frustrated about it because that's not helping anyone anyway. So I'm moving this extra loop down a bit because we do want a few extra loops in the armpit area to have some better deformation. And again, this is stuff you've seen before, just moving stuff around with the transform Gizmo to stop it from clipping through the torso and that'll make it easier to see and figure out what I should do from here. And this is a kind of tricky area. And areas like this, it's always hard to decide what to do here in areas like this where you've got a lot going on and a lot of stuff clipping through each other. How far should you model stuff in or should you generalize an area and sort of just weld things together and not bother capturing every single little overhang and overlap and instead let the normal map take care of that, right? So you can see here as well. The actual shoulder is lower poly than these hard surface parts. So you can see here, the hard surface parts have ended up a lot higher poly than the organic shoulder piece we used. And that's normal because organic parts don't really have all of these sharp panel lines on them, like a hard surface part p. And in order to get that nice curve on this panel line, I've had to add all that extra topology, and there's no overway about it. So, you know, this is kind of what it means to be efficient with your topology. While there are while it is a good idea to keep your polygon density consistent across your model, of course, there's going to be areas where you need to increase that density because there's more detail or there's the types of shapes in that area where you need more topology in order to get them to look good. So, yeah, it's a good idea to have your model be a consistent polygon density, but it's also a good idea to up the density when you need it. Be smart with your topology in that way. As for how to connect this lower polygon area with this higher polygon area, I'm just adding triangles in that area at that border, and it'll look fine. So I've more or less figured out that upper arm area, but I'm getting a little bit bored of messing around with it, so I'm moving on to the next part of this arm. So I'm going through this object and detaching the parts that I'm going to want to work on. So I'm going to spend a few minutes looking through these objects and seeing what they look like and what I can work with. I So this is the part I'm going to be working on now. It's got pretty good topology I can work with. All I have to do is go through it and delete all of the edges that aren't contributing significantly to the silhouette. So it's just double clicking on an edge loop and pressing controlled Macpas to delete it without deleting the faces. So it's going through the whole model and seeing what I can get rid of without changing the silhouette too much. And I'll go ahead and detach this piece from the high poly so I can use it as a target for the conform tools. And that's so I can clean up this little panel line here. So I want to get rid of a lot of these vertical edge loops because there's just too many of them. I don't need this many, but I do want to keep them near the bottom where those round cylindrical details are. So the fastest way I've found for selecting partial edge loops for deleting them is to just delete the edges right next to the area where you want to keep them, and that will stop the edge loop selection from propagating to those remaining edges. So you can see I'm breaking the edge loops there where I want to keep them, and then I can quickly select the remaining edge loop and delete it. So that's a fuss little way I've found of selecting and deleting these things. Delete the edge near the area where you want to keep to stop that edge loop from propagating into that area, and then you can quickly make your selections without having to worry about selecting areas that you want to keep. A no I I D. D. D. D. D. D the Now, cylinders are really easy to re top if you've made them correctly. And what I mean by that is having an even number of sides because then every other loop selection will work. If it's an odd number, then it won't work. But if it's even, you can see right under that ring selection button, there's an every other loop selection button, and that's really good for quickly cutting your polycw in half. I'm going to keep the number of polygons here kind of high because this is a round detail and it's quite prominent. So people are going to be looking at it. It's like a key feature of this design. So I definitely don't want any fasting to be visible. So this is about as low as I'm going to go with it, but there's still a bunch of loops I can get rid of in here. So like inside these chamfers, I don't need all of those extra polygons. Another nice thing about working with cylinders is local transformation mode works really well. If you set your transform Gizmo to local and select an edge loop, the Z direction will always be aligned to that loop, and you can move it freely up and down or scale it on the X and Y axis. No problem. So that makes it really easy to clean up these details because you can see when you delete every other loop, sometimes you lose some of these hard edges. You can see some of these edges are a little bit too small, and I need to scale them up a bit or select one that's a little bit further away and bring it downwards. In order to not lose some of the volume in the shape to keep those straight edges. Like you can see right here, I moved that I kept that polygon from a little bit lower down so I could move it upwards and get that hard edge with a perfectly consistent straight side because the ones closer to that edge, the slightly too small. And you can also just try and manually scale them things to the right side to the right size, I mean. So going through, I can delete a bunch of these loops, um because they're actually not contributing to the silhouette as much and also the circle is getting a little bit smaller here, so I don't need that much topology in this area. So what I'm also going to do is reduce the edge count of the internal cylinder by half. But before I get to that, let me mirror what I did on the top side of this cylinder to the bottom side. So getting rid of all of these extra edge loops that make up the sort of internal part of this cylinder. And I'm making sure that I'm copying what I did on the bottom side for what I did on the top side for the bottom. Now, what I'm going to do to reduce the inner cylinder by half is I'm going to do a ring select of every other edge. And then I'm going to do a grow loop selection to grow that selection up by one extra edge and then control backspace to delete them. Now I need to fix all of the resulting engons from deleting all those extra edges. So I add a turn to polymodifier with limit polygon size to four. And you can see, that's not quite triangulating in the direction I would want it to. I could go through and cut each one in the direction I wanted to, but that seems like a bit of waste of time. So instead, what I try to do is rotate a little bit to hopefully get it to triangle a little bit more evenly. But you can see it's decided to triangulate in the opposite direction that I wanted to. So the next thing I'm going to do is try and change the triangulation for all these polygons. So I go ahead and select the inner ring and then grow that selection out a little bit. And then, instead of using the turn button, I click the retry button, and that just automatically flips the triangulation of your entire selection. And you can see, now it's triangulating in the direction that I wanted to, and I can slightly adjust it just so every single you can see, it's looking really even and nice now. It's all basically just even triangles in that area. And that's a really nice result. So there's a few extra loops that are unnecessary here which I can delete and shift around. Since this area isn't really contributing to the silhouette because it's kind of like a bowl, so it's never really going to be visible as a silhouette. I can actually reduce this part quite a bit. So a lot of these edges are unnecessary, and I'm getting rid of them. So I'm coming up to done with this part, and I think this is where I'm going to end this chapter. We've got a lot done, all of the upper arm, pretty much. So this is a good time to stop this chapter. In the next chapter, I'll be continuing with the same thing, finishing up the lower arm. So that's all for this one. See you in Chapter 19. 20. 19 Retopologising The Mech Arm Part3 Timelapse: Welcome to Chapter 19. Everything in this chapter has pretty much been covered in the last month since we're doing the same sort of thing, hard surface retopo. So all the principles will be the same here, and this episode will be sped up. I a n. I D. D. D. D. D. The Mm. Hey. I like that. That's all for this one. In the next chapter, I'll be doing all of the belts and accessories, so I'll see you guys in Chapter 20. And 21. 20 Pouch Retopo (Narration At Start And End): Come to Chapter 20, and this one, I'm going to be starting on the last part that I haven't touched at all, which is all the accessories and belts. And for this one, specifically, it's going to be the two pouches on the belts. So I'm making a new layer for all the stuff relating to these pouches to be put into. I like to compartmentalize my scenes like this. So what I'm going to do now is head into Zbrush to see if there's anything I can take from the zebush scene that I can use as a starting point for the low poly. So just hit all low. And with the polyframe turned on, I'm hitting BPR render to render out the wireframes of all of the lowest subdivisions, so I can take a quick look and see if there's anything worth taking here. And I don't actually end up seeing anything really usable here. The top and the bottom part aren't regular or low poly enough to even be worth considering. And the few parts that do seem usable, they're just too small to be worth the hassle of exporting and importing and setting up in three DS Max. So I decided to skip the whole Zbrush import part completely. Now, back in three DS Max, I'm going to detach one of these pouches because I only want to retop one of them. Uh, they're both quite similar. There's a little bit of difference in shape. One of them has been squashed and moved around a bit, but they're close enough to where retping them both separately is a waste of work. It's doing the same thing twice. So instead, I'm only going to retop one of them, and then once I'm done, I'll duplicate it, move the low poly into position over the other one, and conform it, move it around into place to match that one, as well. So because this is such a simple shape, there's not really too many tricks to doing this one. It's just going to be a really quick and simple regular old topo. So using the step build to get my first polygon in and lining it up with those little seams on the sides. And just extending around the whole shape. You could, you know, make a box and use that as a base, but step build and extend is also really quick. And now I'm going to detach the top part because it's kind of getting in the way. And I do want to keep it as a separate piece. Theoretically, you could have it rigged to be like an openable pocket if you were to have some more detailed animations like that. I won't be doing stuff like that, but I still want to keep that part separate. And I'm not really sure whether these paths should belong to the top part or if they should be attached to the body. I end up deciding to keep them attached to the body or, you know, the main part of this pouch, because that's what made sense to me. But if you were working for a team, you would probably ask the concept artist about this. Of course, when you're working on portfolio pieces, it's very rare that you would actually get to talk to the original concept artist. So when you're working for yourself, just either pick what makes sense or what would be easier for you to make. Tried to use the bridge functionality within the extend tool, and it just didn't want to work on this object for these edges at that time. I have no idea why. The short cut for is definitely control Alt and drag between the two edges, but it just didn't want to work. Instead, I just used the regular bridge tool to do this part. Now, bugs like this occasionally happen and you just got to deal with them. So these two pouches are actually really straightforward shapes to topo. There's really not that much going on with them, at least for the main sort of part of the pouch, this rectangular, you know, body of the pouch is super basic. So all I really need to do is add these sort of chamf type shapes around the edges because they sort of have a diagonal angle to them around the edges. And then add a few edges around the corners where you see that curved bottom of this pouch and then it sort of crimps inwards towards the top. But other than that, there's not really too much to think about when I'm approaching this part. In fact, the one thing that might actually make it tricky is the fact that it's such a straightforward simple shape that it doesn't really need a lot of topology, and it sort of leaves you wondering, should I add more, even though you've achieved the silhouette, and, you know, it looks perfectly fine. It ends up looking You know, the final topology is actually a lot lower Poly than a lot of the other parts on the character. So that sort of left me thinking for a little while should I be adding more topology to this shape? And the answer to that is no, of course, because it's unnecessary. You don't need to add topo just for the sake of other parts have more topo than this, then I should add more topo here. That doesn't make any sense, of course. So make sure you guys don't fall into the trap of just adding more topology to make parts look more consistent because although your model should be consistent, this should also make sense, right? But I'll get to that more once I'm closer to being finished with this part. And you can see the final topology. But this is pretty close to how many polygons I'm going to be using on this specific part of the pouches. So next up is the lid of the pouch or, you know, the top, whatever you want to call it. And it's really also very similar to the bottom half and really to anything else I've done throughout the whole retopo process. So to start with, I'm just drawing out a plane with the step build tool. And then I'll just extend it out to cover the whole top of the flap. And once I'm done with that, I'll use a shell modifier to give it a little bit of thickness and then work on the remaining details on the outer side. Again, it's a really simple part. There's not too much topology to even add here. There's a few more folds than there are on the body of the pouch, and there's a little loop and the little plasticy hard surface panel on the front, but I think it's all stuff I've shown how to make before. So, feel free to watch through the footage and see what I'm doing. But otherwise, there's not too much new commentary I can provide on these parts. I'll have a few words. Towards the end of this video, I once I'm done making this pouch on, a few little details about what to look out for when you're duplicating identical parts or not identical parts, but parts are really similar but slightly different and need some adjustment, and you want to duplicate them, but you don't want to do stuff like unwrapping twice. So it'll just be a little bit about instances and stuff like that. So if you're not interested in seeing this whole time lapse, you can skip through to 5 minutes before the end of the video, and that's about where I kick in with some extra little bit of commentary. A The The Mm. I I So for the interior of the pouch, I'm just going to extrude downwards. I don't want to should the thing or do the entire interior of the pouch just because no one's going to see it. It's annoying to texture. It's a little bit annoying to bake, and most of the times games skip like the entire interior of pouches and bags and stuff that opens. What you'll usually see is a shallow sort of little hole which is usually obscure. And that's what I do too, just because it's a little bit of time on a part that no one's ever going to see. So that's why I don't bother bothering the full depth of the pouch. And I don't really see any reason why you would want to. Now, this part is basically done completely, I can go ahead and position it over the other pouch. The th thing I'm going to do is select the pouch lid piece and drag it onto the main pouch body in the outliner and do the same for the little plastic clip piece. So drag that little piece onto the main pouch body in the outliner. And what that does is it parents these objects to the object they dragged onto in the outliner, and that lets me move them all together as one when I've got the main pouch body selected because they're all parented to that main object, and they receive all of the transforms from that object. So now I'm going to make a copy of this and move it into position over the second pouch. And what I'll be doing for that is the same thing I did for those little clips on the boots, if you guys remember. So I'm taking the pivot point and putting it in one corner of the object, and then it'll be quite easy to align that single corner with your target object and sort of rotate it and transform it into the right final position. And I only need to do this for the main pouch body because all of the other parts are parented to it and they'll follow along. Now I'm making an instance of all of these parts, and the instances will keep the parenting from the object they're being duplicated from. And it's very important I make instances because I don't want to do the UV unwrapping twice. If you make an instance, they'll basically always be identical to each other. So any changes you do on one instance will be the same on the other object. So any UV unwrapping I apply to one instance will show up on the other. Now, a little thing to remember for these parts, they're not identical. Both pouches has been slightly adjusted and squashed around a bit, so they look more different to each other, so they're not two identical copies next to each other because that would look quite strange. So this positioning isn't going to be a perfect match. And this will have to do for now as a sort of placeholder or a preview. I'm not going to be adjusting this second pouch now until I do the UV unwrapping, because I want to do all of the adjustments after I get the UV maps done because like I said, I don't want to do the UV maps twice, and I can't do any adjustments on this instance without messing up the other instance I have on the left. So I need to leave this one unadjusted and not quite conformed to the final topology yet until I do the UV mapping. And once I've got the UV mapping done, then I'll be able to come back to this piece and finalize it. So yeah, there are a few things I have to leave until the UV maps are done. So that's going to be all I can do for the pouches for now, and now I'll be moving on to the actual belts. So see you guys in Chapter 21. 22. 21 Retopo The Belts: This is Chapter 21, and in this chapter, I'll be doing all the belts. So the th thing I'm going to do is head into Zbrush and check all of the low subdivision levels for stuff that might be a good starting point for the low poly. And right before I do that, I'm going to quickly hide all the other stuff that's in the way, so I can just focus on these belts. I just cut all of the recording of me going through the subtol list and hiding everything I don't need just to save a little time for you guys. And you can actually see that these are all really good starting points for the low poly. They're all nice even quads and they're not too dense, so there's not too much I'm going to have to remove. All it is going to be is a little bit of cleanup and a little bit of moving edges around to make sure they're perfect. So I'm going to export all of these visible subtols and import them. I made a layer separately for all these things I'm going to be importing and working on. And accidentally imported the boots as well because I didn't notice that they were visible in the export screen, but that's okay. And from here on, I'm going to be working on all of these imported meshes and just getting rid of a bunch of edge loops that I don't need and adding them where I do need them. So straightaway, I can see that I can get rid of a bunch of these loops, especially the ones that run horizontally along the belt. Most of these aren't really doing much, but there are a few I do need to keep. Just because if you take a look at the belt from the side, you can see it does have a little bit of a silhouette going on. There's an indent along the top and the bottom, and it sort of bulges out in the middle. The top belt is basically the same, so I'm going to do the same thing for the top belt. The inside of the belt doesn't really need any loops at all, so I can get rid of all of those. The buckle area is a little bit tricky. I could re topple this entire area quite drastically and turn it into a sort of solid, um, cube or rectangular mesh instead of maintaining the actual structure of the belt. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet. It's important to take a good look at your model and see how dense these belts need to be. I feel like they're a little bit too dense, compared to everything else and just compared to, you know, how much detail they actually need. So I'm going to go through and get rid of a bunch of these loops. Now, selecting them individually would take a little bit too long. It's just a waste of time to be selecting them individually and adjusting them. So what I'll do is I'm just going to use the ring select and select every other ring with every other ring button to quickly get rid of half of them and then add them back in where I need them. That's going to be a little bit quicker than just going through the whole belt and selecting which ones you don't need. You know, getting rid of half of them is a little bit too much. Keeping them all is also too many polygons. They're, you know, around the sides. I need more polygons because they're it's more rounded around the sides. And in general, I need something between, you know, the full amount of polygons and half of them. I need a little bit more than half and a little bit less than all of them. So with edge constraints turned on, I'm just adding in extra edge loops and then shifting them around a little bit to even things out. And this will give me a good result. Because this is really straightforward, just adding edge loops and shifting them around with edge constraints turned on, I'm going to skip ahead in the video to where I've done this part for the top Belt. If you do want to watch the full footage of me doing this, check out the real time video file. Everything is in there. There's no cuts or anything like that in those files. Okay, so that's the top belt done. Now moving on to the bottom one. I'm messing around with the buccal area a little bit here, but it's nothing final. I decided to move on to another area. I only really get rid of one loop here. But this part's definitely not done. I will be coming back to this once I've got more parts done. Looking at the bottom belt more broadly, you can actually see that it's got a very similar polygon density to the top belt, and I haven't really touched the bottom one, and that's only because the bottom one was made in zebush with a lower polygon density in the first place. So it's actually really close to the ballpark of the kind of density I want with those belts. So it's not really too much adjusting I need to do for the bottom one. I might come back to it later once I've got more parts done, but for now, I'm just leaving it as it is. Moving on to these little belt loops. So again, really easy to clean up just because of the way these are modeled. And because they're quite simple parts, there's, you know, you can't really mess them up by removing edge loops. So I'm just going through and deleting a bunch of loops, and then for the remaining ones, I'm moving them into position now a good little hint here is if you plan on deleting an edge loop and then moving a different edge loop a little bit closer to the deleted one to sort of replace it or maintain the silhouette, what you should do is move edge loops first and then delete them later that maintains the silhouette better because when you're moving those edge loops with edge constraints turned on, they're still moving towards the original edge loop that you end up deleting later. So that's a good thing to keep in mind. Move edge loops around first and then delete the ones you don't want. Instead of deleting edge loops and then moving the remaining ones, um, you end up changing the silhouette a little bit more than if you were to do that in the reverse. So that's all I'm really going to do for this part. I can't really reduce it anymore. Now, of course, there's a bunch of duplicates of the same part along the belts. And what I could go do now is take my finished low poly for this little clip and align it to all of these high polys. But when I looked at them, I noticed that there are a little bit of clipping issues with some of them. They're not all placed ideally. They're probably just quickly placed in zebrush and that's fine, because what I actually ended up deciding to do is not bother with replacing this low poly object on every single one of these. What I'll do is once I've finished unwrapping and baking this one single part, then I'll just duplicate it around for each one of these pieces. And for that, I don't really need the high poly anymore really. I mean, it gives me a good indication of where I should place the low poles. But otherwise, I'm not going to be using them for baking, so I have no reason to really align the slow poly piece to them right now. I'll do that. Once I finish this low poly piece, I have it baked. I have it UV mapped and baked and maybe even textured. I might even share textures for all of them. So moving on to these pads that go over the belt, it's also going to be a very similar process to what I did for the actual belt because they're made in a very similar way. So really all I have to do is go through double click to select entire edge loops and control bag space to delete them, and just getting rid of any edge loops that aren't contributing anything significant to the silhouette. And that's, you know, most of them really because this was made with Z model, I'm pretty sure. Z model is pretty inefficient. It's a hassle to fiddle around with every single edge. So you end up with a bunch of excess edges that but they're easy to get rid of, so no big deal. Now, I want to align all of these edge loops with the underlying belt because that'll help deformation, and it will also make the gap a little bit more even if you align the edges on both layers. That's what you should always do when you have two layers of clothing or any surface really it'll stop clipping from happening, and it will make the gap or the edge between them a lot more even than if you have the edges differently spaced on both surfaces. So make sure you do that for things like this. And the only other thing I really have to do for this piece is clean up the corners a little bit. And what I mean by that is reduce a lot of the polygons that are on the top surface over here and add a few extra loops for the actual very corner piece, just to make them a little bit more round. I feel like one extra loop would make these parts perfect for what I'm looking for. So I'm going to go through and do that. Add an edge loop there, remove that one. And looking at the low poly, I can see that I don't need that edge loop at all. And making sure they're spaced in such a way that I'm maximizing both how well it sticks to the silhouette and just in general, how it captures that curve as well. And then I can go ahead and weld up all of these vertices along the top, because they're not really doing anything if I have all those extra edges, so I can easily go through and collapse them all down into just these triangles, really. So there's a little bit more work that needs to be done on these corners. But I'm going to take a look at the backside of this pad right before I finish those up. So these edges aren't really doing anything, and they're also never going to be visible, so I can select and get rid of them, leaving just one vertical edge for each edge loop running down this belt around the back. Now for these corners, I'm going to move them in closer to the actual corner part because that will make them look, you know, essentially by compressing the topology into a tighter area, it makes it look more rounded, right? Because the further I spread them apart, the more angular that corner sort of looks with those polygons because the angles between them change a little bit, they get bigger. So by bringing all of these edges closer into the actual corner pieces, I am making them look a little bit more smooth. So that's what I'm going to go ahead and do for all of the corners on this little pad. Another thing I'm going to do is go ahead and weld up some more of the vertices up top. These two don't really seem to be doing anything, so I can easily get rid of those. So for moving these edges around, the edge constraints option is quite good because it lets you just make edge selections and move them up or down as needed, and then you can just quickly use a conform tool on moved parts to make them conform back to the top surface because edge constraints sort of slightly deviate from the surface of the high poly when you move stuff around with them, right? So this side is basically done, and I'm going to copy everything I did on this side to the other side, but I'm going to cut that part from the video because I'm just doing the same thing I did on this side to the other side, so no reason to show it twice. So that's the lower pad finished. Now moving on to the upper pad that goes above it. Also, basically the same process. Need to get rid of a few loops that aren't doing anything. Anything that's really on the flat areas isn't really doing much. So I can immediately just get rid of those. And there's also quite a few loops on the back side that aren't doing anything, so I can get rid of those too. But I do need to add a few more for the ends because they're a lot rounder than for the lower pad. So it's going to need to be a little bit more topology in those areas just because you want them to look round and not pointy like they do right now. So the lower pad is getting in the way for me for this re topo, obviously. So I'm going to detach that from the low poly and also I'm going to head over to the high poly and detach this pad from the high poly, so I can also isolate it and work with these two parts by themselves and not have anything else get in the way. So that's much better to work with now. I'm going to be adding a bunch of edges to either end of this part just to make it look round and smooth. And I'm going to be skipping ahead in the recording until after I've done that because it's pretty boring and there's nothing really to see there. So all of the extra edges I added to the ends of this part, using either the loop cut and slide tool. The shortcut for that is Alt one or just the cut tool and cutting or adding loops wherever I feel like it looks jagged and not perfectly even on the low poly. And once I've got all of those edges in, I can go ahead and start welding them up to get rid of all the engons or just get rid of excess edges that aren't really doing much. So basically, those across the flat part. Now, it's still kind of curved in that area, so I can't get rid of all of them. But I can weld some of them up and save a few polygons that way. I'm trying to keep it symmetrical on both the top and bottom side, mainly just for neatness. They won't really change anything if they are unsymmetrical, but it won't look very nice on the wire frame. I'm trying to keep it symmetrical on top and bottom, just to have it look nice on the wireframe mainly. And also trying to avoid really long thin triangles when welding stuff up. So if you weld two things up and you end up with a really long and thin triangle, maybe just undo and don't weld those parts or move the topology around in such a way that you don't have such a long thin triangle because they are something you want to avoid. They tend to not bake very correctly. So copying what I did on the right side to the left really quickly, and this edge, I'm going to have to go and clean up. Just to make sure that the edges are aligned nicely to the high poly. But right now, I'm going to address all of the edges on the back side. Now I can really get rid of a lot of these on the back because there's way too many over here. So really just roflessly welding everything up back here. Now, of course, I do need to maintain them, make sure that they more or less do line up with the front half to avoid, like I said before, clipping issues and all of that kind of stuff. But I can get rid of a lot of the stuff back here. Like those two edges and all of the edges around the ends, I can also weld up just leaving as few polygons as I need. So I'm going to copy what I did on this side to the other side. Just a bunch of quick welds and that's all there is to it, really. Not going to skip ahead or do any cuts in the video because I don't want to make a bunch of annoying short skips forwards. This only takes 20 seconds, so uh, yeah, all that's left is to get rid of that one endgon, so just a quick cut, and we're done with the back. Now moving on to this edge, what I want to do is make sure I have one edge conformed to the bottom of that little curve around the edge of the high poly and one to the top. So just have these edges tightly around that edge on the high poly. And I want two edges and not just one along because it'll look a little bit better in the silhouette and it'll capture light better. I'll look a little bit nicer than just having a straight edge. There's no really faster way to do this aside from doing each vertex with a drag tool because, like, using edge constraints or, the loop tools to adjust these. I'm still going to have to go ahead and adjust every single vertex with the drag tool afterwards. They're not going to be perfect. So I may as well just do them all individually with the drag tool in the first place. It's not really going to be real time saving if I use those tools and have to go back and adjust every single vertex again. So, that's this part done. I'm going to give it a good once over. Just look at it, rotate it around a bit, just to see if there's anything I missed, but it looks good to me, so I can move on to these little plasticy detail things, whatever they are. So little parts like this can be a little bit fiddly to retopo. Now, I'm going to do exactly what I did with the belt loops for these parts, which is I'm only going to make one of them, and I'm not going to bother aligning it to the other side because I'm only going to bake one of them. And once it's done, you know, UV wrapped and baked and pretty much finished, then I will go back to the low poly and make a copy of it and place it there. I won't be baking two of them or bothering to position it or really align it accurately to the high poly. I'll just place the low poly there by eye. No need to bother getting it right exactly pinpoint in the right position of the high poly. I can just eyeball it when it's all done later. So I'm deleting all of the internal parts of this little clip because if I only keep the top side and the bottom side, I can bridge across between them and basically skip figuring out all of the internal parts, but keeping the sort of shape and saving a tiny bit of time that way. You'll see what I mean here. So, like I said, I'm going to be bridging from the front to the back side or the middle part that I left there. And this part, you know, is pretty much done now. Just a few edges I have to get rid of. Or world up like this. But yeah, this is basically what I want this part to look like when it's done. Now I need to pay attention I'm not putting too much work into this or making it too detailed, considering how small it is, really, it's just a really rough silhouette I'm looking for here. This part isn't going to be very visible, and anything that is visible, the normal map will also help add any sort of detail that someone paying closer attention is going to see. So yeah. Basically, I have to make sure that I'm not wasting too much time on something really small and, you know, that no one's really going to be seeing. I can get rid of all of the extra topology around the back because that part's not visible. It's hidden under another piece. And I can get rid of a few loops around the front just because of how small this piece is. I'm detaching the high poly from the rest of the belt hi poly just so I can isolate it and have a better look at what I'm doing here with the low poly. And once I've got those sorted out, I can go ahead and finish this piece up. So I'm moving out the edges at the back because I'm going to be welding them up. Not going to be leaving any of those chamfers that you see at the front for the back just because this part isn't going to be visible at all, like I said. It's pretty much all I need is a box for the back section. And then at the front, I'll have a little bit more detail for that part that's sticking out. But yeah, I want to be as cheap as I can with this part because it's tiny, and you can sort of lose focus of that when you're really zoomed in on a piece when you're working on it. You can put way too much work into something, and if you're not paying attention to the actual scale of it and how tiny it might be on the actual final model. So, yeah, don't fall into that pitfall. Make sure you keep stuff like this pretty quick, but, you know, put a little bit of effort into them anyways. And that about does it for this piece of the belts. So the process for these is going to be much the same as what I did for all of the other belts, really. Yeah, it's pretty much just a process of selecting and deleting edge loops. So nothing fancy about it at all. What I'm doing here is I'm welding up these edges of this little fabric piece. And right before I weld, I bring them together a little bit with the loop tools, the adjust loop tools panel, and then hitting them with clicking weld down there in that bottom panel to weld those every single vertex that is really close to each other or within the weld threshold gets welded to each other. And functionally, that just collapses those two loops into one loop. And you can do this, or you can add in a swift loop in between those two loops and just delete the loop either side afterwards. I'm not sure really why I did this, but it doesn't really make a difference which one you pick. Over here, just getting rid of all the loops that are in flat areas that aren't doing anything. And I'm going to use every other ring select here to get rid of half of the edge loops on this belt buckle. And moving on to this little plastic detail on the strap. This is like a brand logo or something like that, I'm guessing. Again, I can get rid of pretty much everything. I am leaving the chamfers on the corners because if I just leave harsh 90 degree corners, that's probably doesn't look great, so it's always nice to leave a little bit of chamfer if the object is big or noticeable enough where that will help. I deleted the bottom side of this because the bottom side is obviously never going to be visible, and I'll just be able to clip this part into the strap. So just drag the bottom edge down, so it goes through the surface of the strap. And that way, I don't have to bother welding it and integrating it into the rest of the topology of the strap. But that wouldn't be too difficult to do if I did have to do that. So yeah, no big deal live away. You see, there's some edges that got left over. Probably what happened was when I did the every other ring select, they messed up here for some reason. It might be because there's that bar going across the middle of the buckle that messes with the consistency of the edge loops a little bit. And that's probably what messed up the selection, and I wasn't paying enough attention, and I didn't notice that the selection was kind of messed up, and that leaves me with a little bit of cleanup work. So yeah, when you're doing, especially every other loop selection, it has a tendency to mess up the selections if there's anything weird going on. No weird going on with the topology, but if it's not completely regular edge loops, it will mess up and give you a selection that's probably not ideal. Every time you do use every other ring selection and the every other loop selection, they're basically the same thing just in different directions. Yeah, when you use them, make sure you're paying attention to your actual selection so you don't have to clean things up afterwards. This area is a tiny bit tricky. It's not actually tricky to model. The only thing that's tricky here is what I want to do is just be able to select loops and control backspace, delete them. And when I have something that interrupts those loops, it makes loop selections a bit harder, so I have to go in and manually select edges. Moving on to this little piece, this is part of a bigger detail. It's just like the bottom half of it. Again, really easy just getting rid of every loop that I don't really feel is contributing to the set here. Also, I just quickly selected a loop and did every other ring select, and that's all I'm really going to do for these bits of string. I'm not going to spend any more time on them because I think this will come across just fine. I will look quite good. So yeah, these parts are really quick to re topo. There's not too much thinking I have to do here. And the hide and un hide selection tools are pretty useful in areas like this. Now, when it comes to areas with these little knots, maybe selecting every other loop would be too much. I'm just going in and selecting individual loops I want to get rid of that I don't feel are really contributing to the shape. Now for this little key ring here, same thing, every other ring select is a pretty good lifesaver in this situation, right? It would take me so long to make all of these selections manually. So it's a great one to have, and it's also a very good reason why you want to use even numbers when you're modeling because if you used an odd number, then you wouldn't be so lucky every other ring select wouldn't work. Now, I'm not sure if other softwares actually have a betsol if it's smarter, and it can actually select every other edge, even if you do have an odd number. So I'm not 100% sure of that, maybe there's plugins for three SMAx that make it even more effective. But I'm not aware of that, so I wouldn't know exactly. I like three S Max, and it's generally a good idea to use even numbers when you're modeling, apart from when you're making something symmetrical, which I think I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before. So just going through and getting rid of all the excess loops as always. You have to be in vertex mode if you want to use the world button. Don't forget that. And when it comes to this sexconship there's a bunch more I can get rid of, but I'll get back to it later. Now, I'm going to skip ahead with this belt buckle a fair bit because you already saw me do practically identical one before. So I'm going to cut forwards to where it's mostly done. So one part that the other buckle didn't have is this center pin or I'm not sure what the technical term is, but what I'm going to do is call it the pin. So when you're making these, it's important to take a look at the rest of the buckle, including the strap that goes through it, or actually the pin goes through the strap, because that's a mistake that I made when I was doing my first couple of buckles is forgetting to take the actual belt part into consideration and then spending too much time modeling the internals of the buckle, which aren't ever going to be visible because they're stuck underneath a belt. So yeah, don't get caught in that trap. Now, I am going to keep the center pin. I'm not going to delete it entirely just because it's mostly hidden because if you saw, I am going to be keeping all of those belt, you know, the way the belt loops over in on itself over there. I'm going to keep that. And the inside of the belt is a tiny bit visible from some very obscure angles. So instead of deleting this pin entirely, I will just make it a very simple box and really reduce it down. So that it still takes up space. It's not going to leave an empty hole that it would leave if I just deleted it. So this sort of thing that takes up space is still there. So if you look at the belt from an odd angle, you won't see, like, a big hole in that area, and there will be, like, a sort of box to fill that thing up. But I'm not spending too much topology or time on it, because it's not very visible. Now, back to this hexagon, so all these center parts, like I said, I think I've mentioned this, but when you're making your selections, consider that you can use the grow button to make your selections faster. So only select center vertices and then click Grow to expand your selection very quickly and avoid having to click 1 million times. Now, here I only really need edges around the corners. So I've gotten rid of most of the ones I don't need, but there's still a little bit more work to be done when it comes to this hexagon thing. You can see there are some supporting loops. Now, I do want chamfers on the edges, but I don't want them to be that big. They were too big to be even useful. I only really want the chamfer on the top edge because that's the one that's going to be most visible. The other ones I don't care too much about because they're not really in the way as much. And round the back, I don't need any shamps either, and I can collapse all of this stuff down. So, just, yeah, we delete it. I'm adding a few edges to each of these corners because they do look a little bit jagged to me. And I don't need that many edges when it comes to the middle hexagon because it's slightly smaller. And also, it doesn't really have that much of an impact as a silhouette because it's on top of another object, so it never sticks out in space that much. And also, it's quite significantly smaller than the outer hexagons. So because it's smaller, you need less topology to make it look right as well. So I'm welding down the internal vertices and only leaving all those extra edges for the external part of the hexagon. And now for the middle, while, yes, you can all just collapse all of these vertices down into a central point, that does give you some baking issues when you bake. So for really areas that are going to be very visible, I prefer to just cut them up manually and have a slightly nicer topology than just 1 million thin triangles. Thin rectangles seem to work a lot better with baking. They rarely seem to cause issues, but even after you unwrap, it's always quite easy to go back and adjust things like topology in terms of the way you slice up a flat plane. Other things, more major changes will mess up your UV map, but really basic stuff, just like reordering the direction you've cut something, rarely it doesn't really affect normal mats, not normal mats, UE mats. It does actually affect normal mats. If you change the triangulation, it will break your normal map in that area. So yeah, make sure you have your topology locked in before you bake. But it doesn't have to be locked in before you do your UVs. You can't always adjust your topology when you're doing your UVs. So for this whole part, I just decided to extrude upwards from the little base panel that I did before. On the high poly, there are two separate parts, but there's no reason for me to make them two separate parts on the low poly. That would just be a waste. So instead, I just extrude it outwards, and I'm going to make it all one piece. And this gives me, you know, this is going to speed up the whole process of making this part quite quickly. Just added an edge loop there and scaled outwards. And now I can form it down. It's mostly in the right place, but I do need some adjustment to get it right on the edge there. And I'm going to clean up that edge before I add any more edge loops because if I add another edge loop that I need there, then that's also going to be wonky because the swift loop tool sort of follows the surrounding loops. So your edge loops need to be perfect before. Well, they don't need to be perfect, but it saves time if you have your edge loops done right for the first one, then the other one will come out a lot more straight, like you see here. For this one, I don't really have to go in and adjust it manually at all because I got the bottom one in the right place. So, yeah, pay a little bit of attention to the order in which you perform your operations, right? Because if I added in that extra loop cut before I straightened out the bottom one, then I'd have the extra work of cleaning up both of them instead of just cleaning up the bottom one. So, just cleaning up these corners, spacing out those edges a bit just so they're evenly spaced and making the most use of that topology. Because if you bunch stuff up and then leave other stuff too far away, then it's not really being effective. Is it you're wasting topology that way if it still doesn't look even with all these loops. This is more or less good to go. A little bit of adjustment to go. And then there's those four bumps sticking out from the front. I think I want to model them in because it will look quite cool if they stick out. They will pop up on the silhouette definitely, and it'll be a nice little detail to have. Again, don't be afraid to just use transform Gizmo. Don't always stick with the conform tools if the transform gizmo is going to give you a fast result. Luckily, the topology that I already had for these is quite good for adding these extra details. I can just add one or two extra cuts and then move these around the little bumps, I'm pretty much done here. All I'll have to do is bevel them outwards, and that's all I'll have to do for these little details. And, um, yeah, I don't think there'll be anything else I'll have to do for this piece. Now all that's left is to bevel these little bits out and make sure they're aligned as well as I can. And this is going to be about where I end this chapter. I've covered pretty much everything that I can in this one, and there's a little bit more footage left of me working on these belts. There's a few more parts to go. But it's all pretty much the same stuff that I've talked about here, just a little bit more tweaking, a couple straps to go. So I think that's just going to be a time lapse without any commentary in Chapter 22. So I think I'll let this part finish before I end this chapter. So all that's left here is to cap that top face off and get rid of the resulting engons. Just cutting between all of these parts to make sure all of the remaining faces are just quads. And I think I've done enough rambling for this chapter, so this is going to be where I ended. Thanks for watching, guys. 23. 22 Finishing The Belts Timelapse: Hi, welcome to Chapter 22. There's not going to be any commentary for this chapter because all the things I'm working on here are the same as the ones I covered in the last chapter. It's just a few more straps or belt buckle details to go here. If you've got any questions about that stuff, check the last chapter. This is just going to be a time lapse and please enjoy. No. So that's all of the belts and accessories finished now, and that's going to be all for Chapter 22. See you in the next one. 24. 23 Loose Cloth Detail Retopo: Hi, welcome to Chapter 23. In this chapter, I'll be doing this square of fabric that goes over the pants here. Now, this is actually quite a tricky part. There's a lot to consider here when doing the retpper on how to handle the retppo because for quite a lot of this square, it's very close to the surface of the pants in such a way that you would want to model it into the pants and not have it as a separate object. But then towards the bottom, it hangs freely, and there's an overhang, and it would be a nightmare to retppo. It would be a real hassle to bake. As well, and even texturing would be tricky because it would be hard to see that area. So that's something to think about when you're doing re topo, especially with parts like this that are sort of re hanging, but not quite to the extent where you would think it was worth it to model the thing as a separate object and have two layers of clothes. So in this case, I'm quite lucky that there's a belt going across this part. Bell goes across around about the area where the cloth transitions to being something close to the surface of the pants to three hanging above the surface. That gives me a good opportunity to hide a seam between the free hanging part and the part that's directly on the surface of the pants. What I'm going to do is model the top half that's above the belt into the pants. And then have the bottom half as a separate object completely detached from the pants and hide that separation underneath the belt, which will give me the best of both worlds, and it will make it quite easy to model and bake. The third thing I'm going to do is turn on vertex ticks for the part of the pants that I've already done, and that will let me line up any new topology with the parts that I've already retpoed, which will make it easier further down the line. And I'm just going to jump in and do a really quick retopo of this part. I'm not really thinking ahead too much because I find sometimes it's easier to just go ahead and get something down really quickly and then see what you can work with from there, then try and plan out everything in your head. So I'm just going to get draw some quads over this whole part. And then I'll take a look at how that works with the belts and what I need to do from there, what I need to change to the topology to get it to work nicely with what I have in mind. So I'm just dragging out some quads over this seam that runs along the edge of the fabric here with the extends tool, and then I can extend outwards along the square of fabric. And just, you know, being quick with it, not making it too dense, because I can always add in the extra edge loops with the loop cut and slide tool or the quick slice tool. I forgot what it. The swift loop tool. I can always add in the extra loops with the swift loop tool once I've got these basic loops in. As you can see here, shortcuts l one. And just quickly lining up the injured visual vertices with the drag tool, and again, trying to line them up with the existing topology. Now, again, you can see, I turned on the wireframe with F four. You can do that, too, instead of just using the vertex ticks, which I was doing at the start. The only issue is, if you have a high polymesh in the frame, then it's wireframe will be really dense and it might make it hard to see. But in this case, the hi poly didn't get in the way too much. It's not super dense and luckily, the colors sort of contrast on these meshes. So it's a little bit easier to see. And, you know, this is the basic topo, just following the flow of the cloth here. But I'm not sure if I will want to keep it that way, eventually, because sometimes it's better to follow the flow of the underlying topology instead of follow the flow of the fabric if you're making two pieces that are close to each other. So I need to take that into account. But that's easier to figure out once you have something down and something you can compare two. So now I'm taking a good look at the gaps here and what I can do with them. And you see that's quite a deep cap. It would be really annoying to retpper. And actually, it might be quite nice to have some maybe cloth physics on that part if this was in game engines. So I feel like it makes sense to make the bottom part of this cloth triangle or cloth square, its own thing. I sure will make everything from rigging to baking a little bit easier if it's a separate piece that you can work on in isolation. Now I'm going to model the inside of it, using the scale tool to scale the top edge loop inwards, and then the drag tool to align these vertices. And I'll add another edge loop to the top just because it needs a little bit more curvature. But I'm not going to bother modeling in any of the folds right now because that's something I'll do after I have figured out the whole edge flow and how this is going to work with the belts and the free hanging part. The folds will come last because if I work on them now, then it's going to make everything else so much harder to figure out if I can't really clearly see the edge flow and do quick loop selects to get rid of edge loops that I don't need or something like that. So yeah. But this part at the top is pretty safe to work with because it's not really going to change no matter what I do the top edge is probably going to stay like that. So there's still a little bit of cleanup I need to do. I want to line up all of the edge loops on this cloth piece that I'm working on here with the edge loops on the pants. So I'm going to go through and move some stuff around here and also take a good look at what I've done so far. See if anything else jumps out at me. Now, this front loop, I don't really want to shift around too much because it's lined up with that detail on the fabric, but these other ones I can move around. I want every edge loop on this fabric crease to be lined up with the ones on the pants below it. And if that means, you know, that also means I need to have the same number of edge loops on the top and the bottom. So where I need to, I will add them. But it looks like it was just one short there. So that's fine for now. And now that it's nicely lined up, it'll be easier to rig. It will deform better. There'll be less clipping issues. When it comes to rigging parts like this, what you usually do is you copy weights from the parts below it, or you use a proxy mesh to rig everything at once and not have to deal with all these details. But we'll get to rigging later. I'll try to figure out something really quick and largely automated. Now, you can see that it's kind of tricky to snap to the top surface here because the bottom surface of this cloth piece is getting in the way. So what I'm going to do now is head into Zbrush and go to the high poly and delete the backside of this mesh. To make it easier to use. Now, if I was just re top owing the square by itself, this wouldn't be a huge issue. I could just use the push tool to push all the vertices above the surface, and then just conform them down, and that would be fine. But the problem is, I'm going to be working with all those belts and trying to integrate it into the surfaces the pants. And the more complicated these things get, the more annoying it is going to be to fight, you know, the snapping of the tool to the wrong surface. So I'm going to get this out of the way now. Just delete all of the stuff that I don't need and don't want it to snap to and do that with three subdivision levels turned on. And then once I'm done, I turn free subdivision levels off. And I'm just going to export this at the lowest subdivision level. I'm not going to bother doing the decimation because this is quite a small part, and it looks quite good in the low subdivision level, so I'm not too worried about that. Just going to import it into that layer I've made for these parts, and this is going to be a lot easier to work with now. The snapping will be perfect. So I'm going to go through and quickly conform everything to the top surface now and clean up the edges a little bit on this cloth. And what I'll try now is, I'm just going to see how big the gap is between the body and this piece of cloth, just to see if maybe I do actually want to model these parts as one. So I'm going to go around and extend this edge down and snap it to the surface of the body and see how that looks and see if that's actually workable. Because I haven't had I haven't made my mind up exactly on how I'm going to handle this yet. So I want to try everything I can and see how it works just really quickly. So I'm just using the extend tool to extend entire edge loops, and then the drag tool with my target snapped to the retapologized pants just to see how that works. You know, how big is this gap? And is it something I can just model in or do I really need to figure out something else? And it looks like the gap is yeah, it would be a nightmare to actually model this in and figure out that overlap and the overhang and that kind of stuff. But on these top areas, it's not such a big deal. It seems it's quite flush with the surface, and that part will be easy. So now I'm moving this edge up back to the surface of the cloth. And it's just going to become like the edge of the cloth now. And for the areas where it's close to the surface of the pants, I'll just leave them there because that's how I'm going to model them in and attach them to the pants up there. The whole thing I said at the start about modeling the top half of the cloth into the pants, it's going to become really apparent soon. I'll get to that, you know, in a few minutes, and you'll see what I mean by that. I think it's kind of hard to explain in words. Maybe I'm not the best at explaining things in words, but you'll see soon enough. And I think it's a pretty good trick. It's it's something that does get used, but maybe it's not the most common thing you will see around, and it's maybe something you wouldn't pick up on when you're just looking at pieces of work on art stations. So I think it's a good thing to have in this tutorial series. It's because there's always a bunch of different solutions you can have for how you actually attach all of the pieces together in your models, especially with characters. I can get confusing and tricky. So that's what you're going to see here right now. The last thing I'm going to do is move the loops into the right position, sort of line them up with the belt and the underlying topology for the top half and figure out the same for the bottom half. The top half is the part I'm going to merge into the pants, and the bottom half is the part that's going to be detached. It'll be clear in a second. So yeah, moving these loops down to line them up with the pants or the loops on the pants. And I can just use the conform move tool for that to make it a little bit faster, but, you know, this takes a little bit of time to tweak it and get it right. This is getting closer to what I have in mind. You can see that the loops on the pink part are basically in line with the loops on the left side of the pants there, and that's what I want. Now I'm comparing it and looking at where the belts intersect, and I'm going to figure out the belts and how they work with these parts. Since the belts are diagonal, I am going to have to cut across somewhere to get this to work and move some loops around too to get it to work better. But that's okay. It's not a huge deal, really. Yeah with Altex, I can make it transparent and line it up with the underlying topology even more easily. It's probably something I should have been doing from the start, but sometimes you forget And this is more important for the top half since it's going to since I'm going to just try and, you know, merge it into the same mesh as the pants, so I want to keep that same flow to have it deform well. And to make it easier to skin because when you're skinning, if your parts are more or less symmetrical, it's easier to use symmetry and you don't have to do things twice as much. But it's not always perfect. Skinning is its own subject, and it's its whole own job. You don't really have to be an expert at that, but I always think it's fun to skin and rig and pose or animate your own models, even if it's a slightly more amateurish extent compared to a pro that does it, you know, full time. Now I'm selecting the bottom half of the cloth so I can detach it. This is going to be the part that is a separate mesh and it's going to be completely freed and free hanging that will let me give it some either cloth physics or rig it up with some bones so it can flap around freely, which might be cool. The top half I'll just weld that into the pants. But in order to do that, first, I need to finish up the topology on the pants. Since this is just mirrored, both halves of the pencil just mirror it, and the left side is slightly different from the right side. So I do have to go in and clean up the left side now. So that's where I'm ending this chapter because I don't want to mix multiple subjects into the same chapter. The chapters for the leg are probably going to be all time lapses because it's the same exact stuff that I did for the right side of the leg. I'm just going to be slightly adapting the left leg for the specific folds that are found on the left side. So that's all for Chapter 23. See you in the next one. 25. 24 Finishing The Left Leg Retopo Timelapse: Welcome to Chapter 24. So in this chapter, I'm going to be working on fixing up the topology for the left leg. Right now, it's just a mirror of the right leg, and of course, I have to adapt all of the topper to the specific folds that are on the left leg because, of course, the folds aren't symmetrical on either side. They're slightly different on the left, although the main structure is basically the same. So in some places, it's just going to be a matter of moving the vertices into the exact specific spot, like the area around the pocket. There's no real major folds going on there. It's just slightly out of position because, you know, the simulation isn't perfectly symmetrical on either side. So that's just a tiny bit of adjustment. In areas where there are more heavy folds that are more different, it's more a matter of redoing those parts. Um, so basically the whole process is going to be the same kind of stuff that I did in Chapters nine through 11 where I originally did the right side of the leg. It's all going to be the same stuff just mirrored for the left side. So yeah, enjoy the time laps here. If you want to see commentary on this stuff, uh, you know, go back to Chapters nine to 11. That's where I covered all of this stuff in detail. And this is just going to be a time lapse, you know, showing you guys the whole process. Y. Do. The The Mm. So my Do I Okay, that's going to be all for this one. As you can see, there's a little bit more cleanup to go on this leg, so there will be one more time that's Chapter of me finishing up this left leg. So that's all for Chapter 24. See you in the next one. 26. 25 Finishing The Leg Retopo Timelapse: Hi, welcome to Chapter 25. So this chapter is the same as the last one time lapse of me finishing up the left leg. If you get the gist of what I'm doing here, then feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter. That's where I start doing something new. But if you're still interested, enjoy the time lapse. A I D. D. D. D The I like that No. Now that both legs are completely finished, I can go ahead with welding in that cloth square from a couple of chapters ago. And that's what I'm going to be doing in the next chapter. So that's going to be all for this one. I hope you enjoyed this one, and I'll see you all in the next chapter. Okay. 27. 26 Finishing The Cloth Part1: Hi, welcome to Chapter 26. Now that the pants are finally done, I can get to work on integrating this fabric square into the top half of the pants and finishing up the bottom half of this fabric square. So the first thing I need to do is go ahead and cut the outline of this piece of fabric into the rest of the pants. Because I'm just going to be deleting all the faces underneath it and welding it into the surface of the pants, at least for the top half here. So I'm just cutting along the edge, and I'm trying to place vertices along the edge of the fabric as well just to make welding a little bit easier and have a little bit less cleanup later on. So yeah, just going along with the cut tool and cutting along the outline wherever I need to. And if there's a point that's quite close, then I'll just use the track tool to move it into a position. And that should be all. So now I can go ahead and just select all the parts that are underneath the cloth and delete them because I won't be kating them anymore. And now I can go ahead and attach the top half of the cloth. And what's left to do now is to weld it in. So I'm just going to go along that edge with the target weld tool and weld downwards towards the surface of the pants. Now, if I was to weld upwards from the surface of the pants to the piece of cloth, what would happen is I'd have to go back later with the conform tool or something like that and line them up again. This just makes a little bit more sense, but I'm probably going to have to go along and adjust this whole edge anyways. So it doesn't really make a huge difference what you owes to what the grand scheme of things, I guess, really. So, yeah, in some points, it can be kind of tricky to make these cuts, especially if there's a face in front of the plane you're trying to cut, or if a face gets in the way of the plane you're trying to cut towards the end, like the top half of the face you want to cut is visible, but then the bottom half isn't the cut tool won't really work, and you either have to change your camera angle or move a vertice in order to make sure there's nothing in the way of your camera to the plane you want to cut. For the bottom edge, I'm just going to bridge it up. I'm not going to be welding it down. Because I want to keep that offset, that thickness of the cloth. I don't want to weld it downwards because then it would sort of mess up the silhouette a little bit. So I do need that extra edge on the bottom. Yeah. So for now, just trying to close up all the gaps and make sure it's completely welded into the surface. I'm attaching the hi polys together. So that's the high poly of the pants and the hi poly of that square fabric that goes over the pants just so I can have them set as the conform target both at the same time. When they're separate, then I have to switch back and forth whenever I want to conform to the pants or to the piece of fabric. So at this point, now that the piece of fabric and the pants are attached to each other on the low poly, it makes sense to attach those two parts together on the high poly. So yeah, just carrying on with bridging up this gap at the bottom. It gets a little bit messy in places here, but I am going to be going back to this and doing a whole clean up pass over this whole area a bit later on. And also, I do generally need to rework the topo of the whole top half of the cloth as well because if you can see, it's not quite matching what I originally intended for the hip area. If you remember the sort of very early chapters where I laid out these sort of guidelines or, you know, those first initial base loops for the legs. So that's like, you know, a diagonal loop going across the hips and then a vertical and a horizontal one. This new piece of cloth doesn't follow that at all, so it's probably not going to be ideal for defamation, and it's, you know, it doesn't follow the typical rules you would want for animation ready leg and hip topology. So I'm going to have to rework that basically closer to what it was before I added this square in. Because this doesn't quite work. It's pretty close. I mean, this could probably work, but just to be neat and to have a nice wire frame, I am going to rework it. But first, I am going to clean up this bottom half a little bit. Now, I think, anyone watching, I think you can start to make sense of what I'm doing here. If it wasn't clear before why I was splitting these two halves apart, I think it's going to start getting more clear now. I just deleted those outer edges or faces so I could use the shoal modifier to give this path thickness instead. So you can see this bottom half will have thickness, and the top half doesn't have thickness. And, you know, that's because the top half is under a bunch of belts. It's very close to the surface of the pants. So at no point can you sort of see under it if you look at it from the side. And that's not how it is with the bottom half, of course, because the bottom half sort of, you know, hangs freely. It's not under pressure of any belts. And that's why, to me, it makes sense to have the bottom half fully modeled in. Like, it has thickness to it. It has both sides and the top half to not have it fully modeled in. What can get tricky if you have a mesh that transitions to fully modeled with thickness to a mesh that's just modeled over the top of the surface of another mesh, and that transition point, it can get really tricky to bake because you have a sort of very tight area where it pinches together and transitions to free hanging to attach to another surface. So it can be really hard to bake. It can be really hard to weight paint an area like that. And generally, it's just a nightmare when you have places like that. So in this case, by having it split off as a separate mesh that's not actually attached to the topology of the pants, that sort of solves all of those issues, and it's going to make my life a little bit easier when it comes to doing that part because I'll be able to bake it separately, and the belt hides that seam entirely. So if you saw there when I had everything visible, you couldn't really tell that these were two separate parts or when I had the belt visible on top of them. So that's why I'm doing this. So I'm going to start cleaning up the top half of the cloth now, getting it closer to the final topology. So I'm adding a swift loop here just to make this edge detailing look puffy and rounded like it is on the high poly. Maybe not essential, but I do have the polygons to spare, so I'm not really worried about saving too much in that area. And I'm also going to model that little lip in as well. And I'm going to go ahead and adjust some of the edges in the area where the cloth meets the pants. It's kind of bugging me here how the flow sort of gets disrupted and it doesn't really seem very cohesive here, very continuous. So I am going to cut in one extra edge just to make this wire frame look a little bit better. Again, maybe not super essential. That particular part of the hips and the legs doesn't really form that much, but it's nice to have a nice wireframe either way. And yeah, so just going to go around and do a little bit of cleanup on some of these details. And I will do the same thing that I did for the front back here at the bank, getting rid of those polygons so I can easily add swift loops without, you know, having them propagate across the whole model because that's really annoying. And yeah, the quick way I use to avoid that is to just delete a polygon at the point where I want to stop that loop from going, you know, across the whole model. Just delete that polygon, and then I can add it in back later. So moving on to redoing the topology flow of the top half of the cloth here. So this thing I'm going to do is turn off a bunch of the died poly modifiers, so I can get back to an earlier state of the pants here just so I can take a screenshot for reference because this is the type of topology flow I want to have on the current part. So turning off all the modifiers, getting back to this state, taking a screenshot, I'm pasting that into pure f just to save it and have it up on screen. And now I'm turning back, turning all the modifiers back on, so I can take another screenshot. And what I'll do is I'll draw over this in the nip and step sketch tool with the pen tool. I do that off screen because my drawing tablet isn't being recorded in the recordings, but, you know, it's just drawing, so it's not exactly something that needs to be seen. So what I did there was I used the screenshot I took earlier as reference and just compared that to the topology of the current screenshot, the screenshot of the more recent topology. And I used that to draw out the topology how I wanted it to be. And now I can use that as a reference for cleaning up. It's going to make things a little bit easier. I wouldn't have to think so much in my head about how I need to clean this up. I can just look at the reference photo I have up here using PURf and another thing that's nice about that little reference I drew up is that it shows the current topology, as well as the topology I want at once. So that lets me compare, you know, what I have to what I need in the same spot, and it gets rid of all of the mental work, all the thinking about what I need to do, when I can just see it right there. So first thing I realized I need to do after I, you know, made that little diagram for myself is I need to move a bunch of these loops over to the left and then add a few in for the ones that sort of got lost along the way when I was doing all of these changes to the topology. So just moving a bunch of edge loops over to the left and then cutting a few in where I can see that they're missing from the, you know, underlying edge flow on the pants. So I'm going to carry on doing this for the back half right now. Again, fairly straightforward. I think it's a really good idea to draw out those little diagrams. If you're struggling with your topology, it's much faster to try stuff by drawing them on a little screenshot than to actually go in and model them and then see that maybe it doesn't quite work. And also speeds up the actual modeling process as well if you have that little diagram to follow. Um, so now I'm just moving stuff along according to that diagram. I moved it off onto my second monitor to, uh, you know, give myself a little bit more space on screen, and, um, I highly recommend you have two monitors if you're doing three D work, or I guess that applies for any extensive work on a computer anyway. Um, having two monitors is really helpful and it's a real struggle if you only have one. Um if you want any sort of reference off screen and stuff like that, then it's a struggle if you only have one monitor. And you can get one for really cheap if you don't have one. Like, you don't need really good color accuracy on both of your monitors. It helps, of course, but, you know, you can sort of cheap out on one of your monitors if the other one is quite good. So, yeah, I'm just looking at the flow of the topology, sort of comparing it to what I have leading up to that part and seeing if there's any edge loops disappearing when they hit this cloth piece detail. And if I do see that, then I just add them in with the cut tool or, you know, just act accordingly, see how I can fix that. So yeah, I'm just making sure that all of the loops on the top flow nicely right down into everything below them. I just want a nice even flow, and I sort of wanted to follow the original topology that these pants had before I added in this cloth piece. Ah, so you can see that there's sort of a loop that goes horizontally across the lower butt here, and I'm sort of cutting that back in since it kind of got lost in all of these vertical loops. So those two cuts there, you can see they sort of follow that roundness. I'm just yeah, making sure to restore that sort of flow that was there before before I added this whole cloth piece. And I'm going to spend a few more minutes doing this. And once that's done, I can move on to adding in the folds. Because like all the other parts, I do need to model in a little bit of the fold details in order to get them to read nicely and be more than just a normal map applied to a flat plane, right? We want to have a little bit of three Dness to all of the folds, um, just to get that AA look, right? Uh, folds just being a normal map on a flat plane is fine if you are working to a lower budget, but I feel like to get it to read nicely is a sort of AA character, you do kind of need to pay a little bit of attention to how the folds look, especially in a sort of silhouette. It's nicer if the folds sort of overlap over themselves instead of just being a flat, normal map. That's my opinion, at least. Uh, some people handle folds a little bit more simply. They just adjust the triangulation to match the direction of the fold roughly, and that does get you like 90% of the way there. It does actually read quite nicely, and it does look pretty three D, with a normal map glide, it can look really good. But I like to spend a little bit of extra time modeling them in. I think that makes them look just that tiny little extra bit better and, you know, sometimes it can take a while, sometimes it doesn't take that long. It depends, you know, how fast I'm working and how confusing the folds are or, you know, how scrunched up they are. So yeah, but before I get to that, I need to finish up adjusting the front side, just basically doing the same thing I did at the back to the front. So right now, I'm halfway to the front, just cleaning up the area above the hip, you know, taking my time, just moving the points individually, just because I don't want to be grabbing other stuff with the move conform brush, and there's not too many points here to move around manually with just the drag tool. So you can see how many extra loops I was sort of missing there, you know, how much extra topology I'm having to make up for. So it's a good thing I chose to step back and sort of redo the edge flow for these parts because yeah, they're looking a lot better now, with the way it sort of fits in with the flow of the rest of the topology of the pants and the additional topology around the top. You know, making it look more round is probably going to fit into the torso much better as well. So stepping back and redoing a little bit of this part was definitely the right move, I think. So yeah, almost done. I can almost move on to the faults here. But, yeah, you also always have to be careful not to crab vertices from the opposite side of the mesh. That's always a little bit of a hassle when that happens. It's easy to fix, so you sort of just, you know, find out where that point came from and move it back. But it's annoying when it happens, definitely. A little bit of loading for the cut tool. Sometimes it's like that. Sometimes it's really quick and there's no loading or wait time. Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to load. I'm not sure why that is. Or maybe the file was just auto saving when I clicked the cut tool, that could also be why you saw that couple seconds of loading time there. So, yeah, pretty much done here. What I'll do is I will start going over everything and adding in the folds, once I do a little bit more cleanup. I think there's one more edge I want to add to the top here. And I think that finishes up the topology, basically, or the flow of the edge loops. And the next thing I need to go ahead and do is add the folds in. Okay, so for modeling in all of the fold details, it's really no different to all of the other folds I've done before on this project to the point where I don't really think there's any commentary I can provide on that. Like, it's all stuff I've covered for hours before in this tutorial. It's basically the same stuff as I did for the torso. Probably more similar to the stuff I did for the torso than for the legs because it's kind of a similar shape. It's basically part of the torso anyways. So yeah, if you want additional guidance and commentary on that, then head back to the chapters where I do the torso. Otherwise, I mean, I really think a time lapse of this is going to be self explanatory. There's nothing complicated that's going to be going on here. I'm just going to be adding in cuts with the cut tool, just like you see me doing right now, just for this whole panel, and I'll do the same for the bottom part of this. And then, you know, I'll just line up the bottom part to the top part a little bit, and that'll be all for this fabric piece. So yeah, I think this is where I'm going to end this commentated video. Check out the time laps for sure, just so you see what I'm doing there and you see the final result. But otherwise, yeah, that's going to be the end of this chapter. 28. 27 Finishing The Cloth Part2 Timelapse: Welcome to Chapter 27. This is just going to be a time lapse of me finishing up the sort of cloth square detail that's dangling from the top of the pants. So I'm just going to be modeling in a few folds here and doing a little bit more modeling work on the bottom half of this cloth piece, but it's all self explanatory. Same stuff I've been doing before and I've explained before, mainly using the cut tool really in this episode. So please enjoy. I I that h I Oh. D So the cloth detail thing is finished now, and that's going to be the end of this chapter. Hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you in the next one. 29. 28 Pauldron Retopo: Hi. This is Chapter 28. So in this chapter, I'm doing this Pauldron armor thing on the mechanical arm. I just noticed that I forgot to do it when I was doing the whole arm. So I'm going to do it now. Now, the low poly I imported from Zbrush wasn't really usable for this. So I'm just re topoing this part from scratch. I don't really have anything to use as a base for the retopo. So it's just a good old extend tool and, you know, manually doing this part from scratch. Fairly straightforward. For now, just dragging out the general shape and getting the main loops in. Of course, I need a few extra loops around that little cut out there at the bottom, because it's quite round, and that goes for every single part on this that is more rounded. And once I have these two loops, I've seen in position, I can extend upwards. And you can see I'm not extending this loop very far because again, this is where the pulgron sort of curves around from vertical to horizontal. It's quite a tight curve. So this part also needs quite a bit more density in terms of topology. And, of course, there's those two holes for the bolts that sort of get in the way too. It's important to re top around them or to just take them into consideration while I'm doing this topology. It's nothing too tricky, really. Quite a straightforward piece, but it still needs to be done, right? So the basic shape of this is more or less done here. Just a few more polygons left to add before I can start really refining it and doing the details. An extra loop added down here with Swift loop tool. And probably one more for good measure. Since this whole part is sort of curvy around its there's not really a single part of this part that is flat, although some parts are flatter than others. So yeah, it does need quite a few polygons in order to get it looking nice just because of how it curves in all sorts of directions, lots of compound curves. Well, not really compound. Just, uh I don't know what a not compound curve is called, but it's got lots of, yeah, it's curvy all around, so it needs quite a bit of topology. It's not like a straight flat piece. So yeah, don't Don't be too much of a scrooge when it comes to topology for parts that are rounded. Now I'm sort of laying the groundwork for the two bolt holes that I'm going to have to make. You can see I've modeled around them, so it's nice sort of the topology feeds around them quite well. So it's going to be easy to sort of add those holes in later. I'm moving back here to clean up some of these corners. Just adding in some triangular cuts at the bottom, wherever it gets more curved. That's generally the way you approach curved edges where you don't need as much topology across the whole object, but you do need a little bit more around the bottom. So just adding in a few triangle cuts right near the bottom. To get that roundness in. And because this is the shoulder, you know, I might be doing close up shots of, like, a bust, so head and shoulders, a little bit of the chest. So, you know, this is highly likely to be in screenshots, so I want this part looking extra good, basically. You know, I can't go crazy with it. I can't have the topology be twice as dense as other parts. But generally, you want the top of the character to be a little bit more refined than the very bottom of the character. I think I've said this before, but it's a good rule of thumb, like, stuff that's going to be close up to the face, even like if you were working in studio, the same thing would apply because in cut scenes, you know, it's always going to be usually the character's upper body that's going to be in cut scenes or something like that. So yeah, or, like, in a third person game, when you aim or something like that, it zooms in a little bit on the upper half of your body, again. So yeah, generally, the top half of a character will be a little bit more detailed. It's not drastic, but yeah, feel free to use a few more polygons on the top half of the character because chances are you are going to be doing more of a close up on the top half of the character when you're making renders. It depends on the character, of course. Maybe maybe there's some sort of character where you would, don't have renders of the top off, I don't know. You know. So yeah, adding a little bit of extra topology wherever it seems like it gets a little bit too sparse. Now, this part isn't really going to deform. I think, um, you know, I might parent it to a separate bone that's just attached to the shoulder or something to get a little bit more control over it for posing. But generally, shoulder pads, they don't really have to deform if it's a separate shoulder pad. So yeah, in fury, you could just, like, decimate this or have, like, a really rough, you know, not bother with a nice topology flow if, um, it's not a deforming part. But generally, you know, it's easier to work with nice topology either way when you're modeling. So even as I'm doing the slow poly, I could probably save a few polygons if I went in and triangulated everything and went crazy trying to optimize it and disregarded the edge flow, but at the end of the day, it would take more time for me to do that. And the result wouldn't be significantly different. That's all. So yeah, while you can, for hard surface part, sort of disregard nice clean flowing edge loops, a lot of the time, it's just easier to make it with nice clean edge loops. It's a little bit different for, like, extremely hard surface stuff like a gun and stuff like that, where it's mostly like boxes with hathas and maybe, like, only a few rounded parts. In those cases, yeah, you tend to it tends to not be worth having a nice clean flowing edge loops in your low poly, that is, on the high poly, it's, you know, still kind of necessary. But in this case, it's quite a rounded part. It's just easier for me to retop this way. So that's the main surface more or less done. I think I might need to add an extra edge here because it's quite round and it looks like there's not enough topology for that roundness up there. And I need to figure out a way to make these triangles look a little bit better too. You can see that quite thin and narrow. So I'm going to try and yeah, another good solution is to just sort of have a ring of polygons around the outside of objects like this. So around the entire outer edge, you have a sort of ring of polygons, and then you fill out the inside. That's another way you can retop parts like this. In general, it doesn't really matter all that much. You can see that little indent there. It's sort of like a bolt hole or something. This part, I'm not going to use any topology for in the low poly, just because it goes into the surface, so it's not really affecting the silvertte that much, and it's quite small, so the normal map will handle it just fine. The bigger bolt holes, of course, do need to be modeled in because they're quite large. They're quite significant. So it would look pretty bad if you just sake that down, right? Um, welding up some of those extra vertices that don't really seem that necessary here. And I'll move the other stuff up a little bit to compensate for the verts that I got rid of. Here I'm just spending a couple seconds to figure out how to turn that part into quads. Not essential, but I just like having a slightly prettier wireframe, although I'm not sure if this turned out to look any better in the end, really. So, yeah, just playing around with those vertices for a few minutes here. You could just skip this part, really, and the way it was before was pretty tolerable. But, you know, when you're working on something for lots of hours, you know, sometimes you tend to waste a bit of time when you sort of get set on figuring something out and, you know, it gets frustrating if you don't go ahead and figure it out. Like here, I'm trying to figure out how to make the front side match the back side. And it took me a couple of minutes to get that part to work. Now, moving on to the both holes, this is pretty easy. So I can't exactly use Geoplyhe just because it's not a perfect circle, is it? Um I'm adding a few edges around the hole because it helps to have edges around an area where you're going to have a significant change in vertex normal. So like here, you know, it would be like, a pretty steep corner. So it's better to have edges closer to that loop to sort of improve the gradient of the vertex normals. What I mean by that is, if you've got one vertex normal that's pointing straight upwards, and then the next one is at 90 degree angle to that, the gradient of vertex normal between those two is going to be quite severe compared to if it was 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees, right? And, um, that sort of affects normal maps a little bit when you're baking. Again, it's not usually significant, but I'm sort of, you know, a little bit of a perfectionist, and I want to teach the absolute best practices here. So I mean, you know, if you're watching this tutorial and you cut a few corners, that's fine because some of these things I'm sort of overdoing and overthinking slightly. But when it comes to portfolio pieces, sometimes you do have to push that little bit more right? It's maybe slightly counter intuitive to think, but often you're cutting more corners when you're doing work for an actual studio than when you are for your own projects because when you're working for an actual studio, you know, there's time constraints, and there's budget constraints, and all those things pile up to the point where you might be rushing some things. But when it's a personal project, uh, you know, usually, when I'm working on puzzles and stuff, it's because I want to improve my portfolio, and I really want to sell myself as three D artist. So I always try and make things as good as I can and not really cut any corners. That being said, if you try too hard, I've had nightmare projects before where I'm trying so hard to make it perfect. Or, you know, what can happen is you're trying to make something better than you can actually make it. You know, Your skill level isn't quite there, and you're just trying to force yourself to make something better than you can realistically make, and you end up stuck working on a project for months and months. And not finishing it when instead, you could have made two projects in that time, and maybe the second one would actually be of the quality that you want because of all the things you learned on the first one instead of, you know, banging your head against the wall on one project for twice as long. And especially when you spend a really long time trying to perfect the same project, what can happen is things you did at the very start of the project in terms of the sculpt. Maybe you don't like them anymore by the time you're done with it. Like, you've gotten better, and you can see that your sculpt isn't perfect, but it's too late to go back and change it. You know, it would mess up your low poly or your bakes if you're done with texturing. So yeah, at some point, you have to stop being a perfectionist and just go for it and finish your projects. That's definitely something I had to learn to do. And I'm not trying to humble Brag here and say that, Oh, I'm, I'm just so good that I tried to make everything perfect. That's that's not what I'm trying to say at all, right? Just I guess the gist of it would be it's better to finish projects than it is to struggle and struggle on a project and be dissatisfied with it, you know, it's quality over quantity most of the time, right? But at some point, you do actually have to produce that quantity. Um, because if you're going for quality, but you never make a single piece of work because of that, because of how high you've set your bar, then that's also no good. Yeah, sorry. A little bit off topic, but there wasn't there's not really too much going on on screen here. I'm just slightly reducing down the inner faces of this fortune. I want to keep them there because, you know, it's not always clipping into the surface completely, and I don't want to weld it down into the actual shoulder, because that seems like too much of a hassle. Especially pauldrons are tricky to rig. The shoulder is a nightmare area for professional rigging artists struggle with it all the time. It's like, you know, one of the hardest areas on a character to rig, especially with how interconnected it is with everything else, the clavicles, the shoulder blades and all the muscles there. So it's a nightmare area to rig, and if you're doing any sort of shoulder piece, it's better to just keep it separate for your own sanity, because you know, unless it's something that sort of deforms a lot. That's not a hard surface piece, then you can sort of attach it to the shoulder. But if you can keep it a separate piece, and that sort of makes rigging easier. And posing it easier, if it's a separate piece, you know, I can just move it around and put it exactly where I want. Instead of hanging it integrated into the shoulder, then that's a lot trickier. And because it's a separate piece, that's why I need to make the backside of it, really, because, you know, who knows at what angle it might be slightly visible. And the thing is, especially in game engines, unless you apply two sided material, which you can do for renders. Of course, that's fine. But unless you apply a two sided material, the backside of these messages is going to be transparent. So if you catch an odd angle of this piece, where you can see the backside and you haven't modeled in the back faces, you can sort of have a gap in your character where the environment shines through the backside of it. And, you know, that's definitely not what you want to have on a render. So that's why I decided to quickly model in those bank faces. You know, all I did was shell and then weld some faces on the backup that were, you know, unnecessary, really. So modeling in these bolt holes, all I did was inset and move them into the right position because it's kind of a shallow, sort of scooped in hole that seemed to work with the topology quite well, or not with the topology, but with the shape of the mesh quite well. And so I don't need to do this twice. What I'm going to do is clone this part and mirror it and then fit it to the other bolt hole. But before I do that, I want to get this part nicely cleaned up and finalized, so I, you know, don't have to do this twice. So there's just a little bit more tweaking to go when it comes to this part. I want to make the round part around where the bolt goes a little bit rounder. There's a little bit of an edge that I'm not quite getting here. So I'm adding a few extra vertices. You can see there's a few sort of transition plane transitions there. And while you can sort of generalize them in the low poly, not really model them in. But in this case, I'm a little bit worried about stuff clipping into the actual bolt, which might look a little bit ugly, if for some reason it pops up in a close up. So that's why I added that extra little edge just in case there's some sort of clipping, maybe not entirely necessary, but, you know, it'll save me a little bit of work later if there were to be more clipping. I'm adding a few vertices around the outside, too, just so this really does look round and there's no jagged edges. And I think this is good enough to go now, so I'm going to select this entire region just using the grow tool to speed that up a little bit, so I don't have to select every single phase and then Control Shift drag to copy that as an element and then mirroring it in the direction I need. And I can move it above the hole, and you can see it's a pretty close match. There's not too much tweaking I'm going to have to do from here. Of course, the shape is probably slightly different on either side. This isn't a symmetrical part, I don't think. So yeah, there's a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done, but it's not a really big deal. And it's a lot faster than having to model this part over from the start again. So yeah, just going to use the conform tool to conform that area down as well and add the same cuts in that I did on the other side so I can weld it all up. And quickly going along with the target world. If you actually get your vertices in the right position, you could try and just use the regular weld by distance. And, you know, if your vertices are close enough to each other, you could do this in one click. But sometimes, you know, if you have other vertices that are closer to each other that you don't want to weld, then, you know, it'll mess those up. So it's something to be a little bit careful with. Sometimes it's just quicker to go through and target weld everything because it doesn't take that long really to go over 20 vertices and target weldm. So I'm just going to spend a few more seconds lining everything up, making sure it's nice and even with the track tool and maybe some relax tool. And yeah, that's this part pretty much done. Of course, there's these two bulges down on either side. So these, I'm just going to cut around them and bevel them outwards and move as much topology as I can around to fit them, and then just cut around them. Nothing fancy here. And I'm not going to end up duplicating these parts like I did for those bolt holds because they're a little bit more simple. It only takes a few minutes to make them, and it would be more of a hassle to get the clone into the right position, then it would be just to do it over again. I'm going to select the faces that make up that area and then just belve them roughly into the right height and width of this top part and then just use drag tool to get them in the exact right position. I'm not going to model in the little dimple in the middle of this protrusion. Um, I did add an extra edge loop because, you know, sort of curves inwards. That's probably unnecessary. Now that I think about it, now that I'm looking at the footage, maybe that's too much, but it doesn't really make a difference. You know, when it comes to AA stuff, you can't afford to be a tiny bit wasteful, and nothing's ever going to be perfect. In hindsight, you know, you know, watching these recordings, yeah, you are always going to find little things that maybe you would have done differently in hindsight when you finish a project or in this case, when I'm reviewing the footage. In this case, I don't really think that's a mistake. It's just maybe unnecessary, not really a huge deal. So that's how I'm going to handle the other one, too, same exact process, cut around it, and then bevel it. In fact, I'll just skip ahead because it's the exact same thing I did on the other side, so no need to make you guys watch it twice. If you do want to watch it twice, it will be in the real time video version of this chapter. So I'm just going to throw on that default material that I always use. And lastly, I'm going to go around and chamfer around the outer edge just so it's not so sharp when you see the when the exact corner is visible. And because there is a little bit of bevel on these edges, it's slightly rounded. It's not exactly a bevel, but the corners rounded. And if you have a 90 degree angle, that can start to sort of show up in the normal map. So it's generally nice to have a little champ around edges that are very sharp. So once I shampor it, I go over everything with the conformol just to make sure it conforms a little bit better. And that's it for this part, pretty much. I'll sort out the smoothing groups. Just very temporary solution, set it all to one smoothing group. Later on, I will have to go and redo all the smoothing groups. Not redo them all, but adjust them according to how I do the unwrap because when it comes to hard surface parts, it's quite important to adjust the smoothing groups to get a really nice clean bake. But it's dependent on your UV islands. So it's best something to leave until after you or not after you've done your UVs, but while you're doing your UVs. Um, but, you know, in the meantime, it can be really annoying to look at a model that's really ugly. So, I like to just do a quick fix, either apply one smoothing group or, you know, auto smooth it to a certain threshold where it looks a little bit nicer, because if your smoothing groups are all messed up and you can't really see your part properly, then, you know, one, it's annoying to look at in viewpotF me, at least. I bugs me when something's sort of broken in the viewpot even if I do know that there's nothing wrong with it. And also it gives you a better idea of what you're seeing and what you've made in your low poly. Here, I noticed that there's a little bump that's visible in the high poly of the shoulder, and it's not on the low poly, so I'm just going to model that in really quickly. Really just cutting around it and then adding a few vet sees in order to get it to visibly bulge outwards on the low poly really quick, really simple. And that's going to be all for this chapter. The next chapter, I'll be doing the scarf that's on the back, and I don't want to mix things up like that. So I'm going to leave this chapter a little bit short. And the next chapter will also be short, but, you know, I think it's a little bit better to have just one topic per chapter because then it'll be easier to find stuff if you're ever backtracking or, you know, want to find a specific episode. So yeah, that's all for Chapter 28. See you in the next one. Mm. 30. 29 Cape Scarf Retopo: Hi, this is Chapter 29. In this chapter, I'll be working on the scarf here. It's going to be a really quick chapter just because this didn't take very long at all. It's just going to be 15 minutes. Now, when it comes to thin pieces of fabric like this that are free hanging, so you can see both sides of the fabric. There's a few questions that come up when you're doing retopo for them, and the biggest one is, should you make it solid, double sided with thickness to it, or just have it as a single sided plane, and both are viable. And, you know, both are used very often. These days, having fully modeled three D cloth, you know, with thickness is getting more common, or it's fairly common now. You know, back on the earlier generations of consoles and stuff, it would be pretty uncommon unless it's, like, a really thick piece of cabric like that padded piece of cloth on the pants there, I did earlier. That you pretty much have to model with thickness because you can't get away with making it a single sided plane. It's obviously a thick padded piece of fabric. So, you know, it's got a really significant thickness to it, so you can't really make it a single sided plane. But when it comes to a scarf like this, that's really thin, it could easily pass quite well even as a single sided plane, right? So you sort of have to decide what you're going to do here. I'm going to model this with thickness. So double sided, you know, basically, like, a really thin cube. That's the easiest way to put it, right? I'm just going to model one side and then shell the whole thing. And the reason why is it isn't a completely thin piece of cloth, right? It does. You know, it's kind of thick. I guess, I'm not sure how to describe the kind of fabric here. It's all sci fi stuff. I don't think there's, like, a specific kind of fabric here that's in mind, but you can tell it's meant to be quite thick. You know, the thickness of some kind of synthetic lever or something like that. Uh, if it was just, like, a thin piece of clotton then, you know, you probably wouldn't model the thickness just because of how thin it would be. Another case where you don't want to model thickness is if it's a torn piece of cloth, right? So if the end is torn or if there's a lot of holes in it, you can't really model something like that with thickness because, you know, it would take a huge amount of work and polygons to model out every single, you know, torn end of the cloth and all the holes in the cloth. And in that case, it's much easier to make it a single sided plane and apply a two sided material to it with an Alpha texture, masking out all of the tears and all the holes in the cloth. And, you know, that can be troublesome, too, because sometimes, you know, you want to have a torn piece of cloth, but you want to make it look very heavy. And thick. And if you just make it a single sided plane to get all of the tears in, then, it can be a struggle to make that thick cloth look thick without having it to be double sided because what happens is when you look at a single sided plane piece of cloth, from a certain angle from the very side, it disappears in the camera, right? Because you're basically looking at something with no thickness from the side, so it's practically invisible. And that's the main issue with having a single sided cloth geometry is that at certain angles, it basically disappears. And that's why I've chosen to model this with thickness. There are a few things you can do to alleviate the issue of cloth disappearing from a side angle, and that is to, you know, make sure it's not completely flat and sort of curve the ends around a bit. So you want to sort of make sure the ends have a little bit of a curve to them so that very minimal amount of cloth very minimal amount of the mesh turns invisible from that angle because as soon as it curves, it becomes visible again, right? It's only invisible when it's, you know, head on towards the edge of the polygon. So, yeah, that's I know I've been talking more about single sided cloth than double sided cloth here, which is, you know, I'm making double sided cloth here, so yeah, talking about something that I'm not doing on screen, maybe not exactly useful, but, um, you know, I think it's a good idea to tell you guys about the different options and also all the issues that come with the other option, because if you're making small bits of cloth or, you know, something that is very thin, you probably are going to make it as a single sided plane. So I think that's useful knowledge to have. In case of a double sided plane or cloth, it's really no different to making it single sided. The only difference is afterwards, you will shell it basically to give it that thickness. So just using the shell modifier here and tweaking the inner amount to how thick this cloth is, it's better to leave it a little bit thicker as usual because that makes conforming it back down to the cloth surface a little bit easier. Now, depending on your folds, you might not even need to adjust anything at all, and just shelling it is enough. I'm pretty sure there is a trick. You can try to only have to bake a single side and then shell it afterwards and have it share UVs from both sides. But it's not something I've tried. It's just something I've fought about a lot. So if you're up for experimenting, you know, that's something you can try. Um, so right now, I'm just going through and conforming all of the edges. The conform brush won't really work here because I want them in very specific place. I'm also adding an extra edge around the outside just because this is a quite soft curve around the outside. And I do want to represent this in the low poly. I think, you know, it might show up and it might be nice to have it actually be curved and look like a sort of thick piece of some kind of synthetic level folded over on itself and sewn sewn over. So that's why I'm adding that extra edge just to give you that roundness. If it was just a square, firstly, just leaving the edge square without this extra edge would kind of make retopo a little bit harder because then I would I'd rather lose some of the size of this cloth because, you know, when you're conforming around a rounded object, I can either choose to conform, you know, put the vertices a little bit further away from the actual rounded part. And that way, I preserve the thickness, or if I move them in closer to the very edge of the rounded part, then I lose thickness, but I keep some of the volume a little bit better. Or alternatively, manually move them in just with a gizmo without any conforming into the right place. So that would take a little bit longer than just going through and adding that extra edge loop and actually modeling in the roundness. But I guess it would save you an extra edge loop, right? But you will miss out on the roundness either way. And I feel like that's kind of maybe not something of huge importance, but it is a sort of aspect of this cloth I do want to keep. In the low poly. Now, here I am modeling in the parts of the cloth that are sewn over onto themselves. And I end up going back on this and undoing it all just because I didn't realize that this is the inner side of the cloth. So this is the part that's facing towards the character, and it's basically barely ever going to be visible. And I didn't realize this because I was working with it isolated. And, you know, rotating the camera around, I just, you know, lost my bearings and forgot that this was on the inner side of the character. And so all of this work is kind of unnecessary. You can if you don't want to see this, you can skip a few minutes ahead. But I guess, you know, if you're doing a if this cloth was the other way around, maybe you would want to model this in. So I've just kept this footage here, just going around and using the drag tool to get all the vertices in the right place around this sort of seam So yeah, but I do end up deleting this because it's on the inner side and not really visible from pretty much all of the normal camera angles you would have. It does take me quite a while to realize that I messed up in this way. So, yeah, I only end up deleting these extra edge loops right before the end. But, yeah, for now, you know, if you're following along exactly with this tutorial, like, doing everything that I'm doing, then you can sort of ignore this part. If you're doing your own thing, then, well, yeah, that's self explanatory, then. Um, so I'm just cleaning up the other side of the scarf here because of the way I added the edge loops to accommodate this little detail here. They carried on through to the other front side of the mesh. So what I'm doing now is just getting rid of all those excess edge loops that were on the front by just selecting the edge loops. But, you know, deleting one edge before they reach the inner side and then selecting the edge loop that's still left on the outer side to delete it. I'm lining up a few of these edge loops with a few details on the scarf. Now the reason I'm using the track tool is because the conform brushes can be a little bit finicky when the meshes is thin, right? But, you know, they're just temperamental. You know, sometimes they won't work. Sometimes they will. Now I'm adding just a few extra cuts right near the bottom just to add that extra resolution needed for the curvy, you know, bottom edge of the cloth. And yeah, that's generally what you will see on capes and all sorts of things. You don't need that much geometry higher up. Although if you are going to be using, like, a lot of cloth physics, if, you know, you're using Unreal engine four or something, sometimes, yeah, loose hanging fabric that is that has cloth physics supplied will be a little bit more dense just so the cloth physics looks nicer. But, you know, that will, you know, that's something to experiment with if you're actually using cloth, there's set up a few test scenes and see how it works, how it looks there. In this case, you know, I'm probably not going to be doing any of that for this Mum's Z render. But you do need to add more edge loops, not edge loops, more edges towards the bottom of your cloth in order to not have it be showing up as jagged in the silhouette This part is, you know, really important. So, you know, just doing a few triangle cuts and adding them to near the edge of your cloth. So it really does read as a round piece of cloth, and you can't see all of the jagged polygons. Now you can see towards the top, I've sort of reduced the amount of detail and the amount of polygons because that part is under a hood. It's really not visible under any condition. So that's why you know, a lot of the edge loops are reduced towards the top, and all of the detail isn't really modeled in. Now I'm just deleting those extra edge loops I made for that seam detail around the inner side. You saw that was just quick deleting three loops. And I, you know, problem solved. So, yeah, that's now this cloth is, you know, the way I want it without that unnecessary internal detail. And this is pretty much good to go now. Just a little bit of cleanup. We're going to delete the top edge because, again, like I said, it's never going to be visible. It sort of tucks under the hood and into the sort of neck covering thing over there. So the top half really is never visible, only the bottom half is. And this is basically the finished mesh. Now, you can see that the bottom silhouette is still a little bit jagged here. Especially if I zoom in a little, you can definitely still see the polygons. So I'm going back to fix that. And that's why it's important to take a look at your low poly by itself and zoom out and zoom in a little bit just to see, you know, how it looks. If you can see if it's jagged or not, from a distance and, you know, from up close. And when you're zooming out to look at your thing, sort of think about the distance the model would be from the camera in your screenshots, right? And that's how far you want to zoom out, relative to the whole screen and everything, you know, that's what you want to keep in mind when you're zooming out, because, you know, up close, you're always going to see polygons if you zoom in close enough. So you want to look at it from a distance that your renders will be. Okay, so that's the scarf cape thing done, and that'll be all for this short little chapter. Thanks for watching. 31. 30 Left Glove Retopo: Hello. This is Chapter 30. So in this chapter, I'm working on the left glove. So most of it is already done because it's very similar to the right glove, which I've already done. And this is just the glove mirrored to the left side. So there's a little bit of cleanup I need to do. There's some surface details that are different on this glove. For example, these little knuckle pads aren't present on the left glove. And also, there's a little bit of a cuff that goes over the top of the left glove, which is different. You know, it's rolled over here, so I also have to model that in. But the bulk of the topology is in the right place already. So most of it is just going to be going through and lining up the seams with edges and then using a conform tool to sort of conform everything into place. So I'm using the push pull, brush to sort of push all of these vertices above the surface to make the conform tool work a little bit better. I don't want to go into Z rush and delete all of the bank faces just for this because it seems like a bit of a hassle. So that's why I'm using the push pull brush instead here. So I'm just going to gradually go over the whole glove with mainly conform tool, and then where necessary, I'll use the drag tool to move individual vertices into the right place. Most of this stuff is the same as the other glove. So most of the main folds are in the right place. There's been some minor changes added, and that cuff has been changed a lot. I can keep the innerside of the cuff here from the low poly from the right glove. I'll just scale it inwards a bit and conform it over again because, you know, this part mostly fits, so I can keep that. But I do need to get rid of the top half of the cuff here because, you know, that's going to have to fall down and over on itself. So I'll have to make all of that from scratch here. And getting rid of all of these cuts that have been added for the folds because, you know, they're different on the site, and also I won't be having any stuff like that at all on this part of the glove because this will be hidden over the clove that's folded in on itself. So, this part won't really be visible at all, apart from when you're looking at it from a certain angle, and in that case, you know, the folds aren't that important in this area. Another thing I have to do is line all of these edges up for all of the panel lines because they're slightly off. So yeah, I have to go through and line them up again. Just using the drag tool here, really basic. Yeah, just going around and making sure stuff is lined up. Again, in some places, it can be tricky to decide. So I just tend to leave them and maybe focus on another area. That sometimes helps you figure out how to line stuff up because, you know, everything's really connected. So once you fix one area, that sometimes gives you a better idea of how to fix a different area. Don't linger on one spot too long. But everyone's different in the way they sort of approach these things maybe, you know, I like to hop around sometimes and figure out different problems if I'm, you know, if I feel like something is going to be tricky or annoying. But in other cases, maybe for some people, it's better to just sit and think about something. I don't know. Yeah, so again, just getting rid of that top loop because it was all had a few extra cuts there that weren't really useful to this side of the glove. So I can just get rid of those. And now for the outside of the cuff, I just selected the whole wrist area and control shift to duplicate it, and then I've scaled it outwards. So that was control shift while scaling. And then I decided to delete the extra two loops, just because conforming three times as many loops would sort of be a waste of time. I can conform one loop down and then stretch it out over the whole thing and just extend it instead of having to do the same for three loops. So sometimes it's more of a time saving to conform only one part of topology. If it's like a cylinder, which is easy to extend and extrude, then there's no sense in trying to conform down three whole edge loops when I could just do one And here I'm approaching the inside as well a little bit. And you can see this is a pretty quick solution to this cuff, taking another part that's already done and duplicating it and scaling it. Another advantage of this is I have the exact number of edge loops I need, so I don't have to count or add any later when I'm welding stuff up. This will match perfectly to the existing topology. All I have to do now is line it up and then extend the bottom downwards a and you can see this is quite dense, but that's because this is a round part. It's on the hand, so it's kind of a focus point. And I want the bottom edge to, you know, look nice and round. There, if you have the same number of sides on two objects that you're bridging together with the bridge tool, then you can just select those two edge loops that you're bridging, and it will figure out all of the stuff in between for bridging by itself. You don't have to go in and bridge each edge individually there. So that's a nice thing about this when I know I have exactly the same number of edges. If you don't have the same number of edges, it will sort of, you know, get shifted along, and, you know, the bridge tool might still work, but it tends to mess up which edge has been bridged to which edge, and it ends up getting offset and kind of messed up. So yeah, that's why it's good to have, you know, the exact same number of edges on these two objects and not having to do any guesswork. So you can see a very quick single extend gives me, you know, basically all of the topper I need for this upper cuff, and now I can just add extra edge loops as needed. So that's a really quick solution. And then, you know, you can use edge constraints also. When it comes to cylindrically shaped objects like this, it's very easy to do the retppo because all this stuff sort of works, you know, edge constraints and all that kind of thing. It's easy to extrude and extend things. So, yeah, I think I only need about three edge loops around on this cuff of this glove. So that should be enough. Now cleaning up the inside a little bit. I don't need so much topology on the inside because most of this isn't ever going to be visible. But I do want it roughly lined up to the seams and stuff like that. It still has to be nice. I can't leave it all, you know, a wonky like this. So I'm going to spend a few minutes straightening out the inside of the glove here. With the drag tool, I don't want to use the conform brush just in case it starts picking up some of the vertices from the other side of the glove. That's the problem with areas like this on a character. You'll start, you know, areas where there's multiple layers of mesh folding in over on themselves. They are a nightmare. And, you know, if you're working on your own concept, um, Again, for a beginner, that's a lot of people will not advise working on your own concepts, because that can be a whole world of trouble in itself. But, I feel like a lot of people still want to do that sometimes, because it's a lot of fun, too. And, you know, it's a lot of people want to make their own ideas in three D, not just the concepts. So yeah, but if you are working on your own concepts, um, you know, you can try and sort of avoid stuff like that. Even though it is tricky to avoid because they look great. You know, cuffs like this and all sorts of details like that, they look really good. And that's why a lot of concepts and designs have them. So they are kind of unavoidable, and they're really annoying to do when it comes to retopper. That's all there is to it. You know, you just sort of have to struggle and fiddle around with these areas. Yeah, just cutting in some of the folds on the cuff here because they're somewhat visible. So, you know, if I was just to leave this as a straight cylinder, I don't think it would look great. It would sort of be pretty apparent in the silhouette of the renders that this part is just a cylinder with a normal map applied. So I feel like I do need to cut some of these folds in just like I did for the other glove, you know? Another thing is maintaining consistency. I can't be, you know, doing something on one glove and then not doing it on the other. It just looks Uh, it just brings up questions on the wireframe, like, why did you do that and not this? So yeah, got to get these folds in. Again, really simple, same stuff I've done a bunch of times before during this tutorial, cutting around the folds. One for the high tallest part of the fold, and then, you know, a cut for each side of the fold where it gets the lowest and trying to maintain the original edge flow and just adding more to it instead of welding and changing the original edge flow completely. It doesn't take too long, you know, fairly quick cleanup. But you can see there are quite a lot of bulges and stuff going on here that is probably a good idea to add tooth low poly. Because otherwise, yeah, this part would be very straight and smooth looking, which probably isn't ideal. So yeah, do take your time with all of these parts. You don't want anything looking like, you know, just a plastic cylinder or something like that, completely smooth with no dinks and little bulges in the silhouette for the low poly. Even though a normal map can do a lot of work in making something look like it's crumpled up piece of fabric when you have the polygon budget to add those things to the actual silhouette, it does help a little bit. So now I'm going to try and do the inside of the cuff. And to do that, I need to be able to detach the folded over part of the cuff so I can access the inside of the cuff, the inner, you know, part of the glove and actually see it. So what I'm doing here is I'm lining up my viewpoint with the cuff so I can use the lasso select to select the top edge of the cuff here and detach it. And what that lets me do now is just select the entire outer part of the cuff because it's no longer connected to the rest of the glove. So I can just do an element selection on the outer part of the cuff and select it and detach it all in one go like that. Otherwise, it would be really tricky to just select that part if it was still connected to the rest of the glove. So that's why I detached that top part there, and I can go ahead and reattach it once I've detached the outer part of the cuff. So now I'm doing the same for the low poly as well. And now I can see what I need to see down here, the inner part of the cuff, and I can line stuff up and finish this part up. So I'm going to go in with the jag tow, and I'm not going to go all the way to the very end. You know, I'm not gonna model it up right to the tip of where the cuff folds over because I don't really need all that depth on the low poly. It's unlikely that the camera is going to be at such a head on angle where I can see that part. And also, even if it is, you won't be able to tell if the cuff is slightly more shallow on the inside than it should be. Like, it's not a detail that you can really tell is being changed, really. So to save myself the hassle and to save some polygons and some clipping issues later down the line, because every time you have polygons that are layered over on themselves, you always run the risk of clipping when you rig and skin your character, and it makes skinning a little bit harder. I mean, it's not too bad if you use a proxy mesh and just copy the weights over from the proxy mesh to these parts. That's pretty much the only way to rig more complex stuff like this is to use a proxy mesh. But that's not really something I want to get into. And, you know, rigging is it's a whole job of its own and its own topic, and, you know, there's professionals in rigging that would better be able to explain that stuff, you know, best to stick to one job at a time, I think, when it comes to this stuff. Okay. So I've just sidetracked a little bit here, and I'm cutting in the polygons for these little rubber pad details on the gloves. Just so I can extrude them outwards. And I'm just going to clean up the topology a little bit on the inside there as well. And I'll select all of the interfaces and just bevel them outwards to roughly the shape that they are on the hi poly and then I'll conform them down with the dragtle dragging each verte see where it should be. And something like that, looks quite good. And now I'll do the same for the other side. I've just skipped forward in the footage to save you the, you know, odd minute of me doing the exact same thing just on the other side. But you can see what I did with the topology quite clearly here. It's the exact same thing that I did for the same detail on the other side, just cutting around it, doing a little bit of cleanup on whatever messed up engons or triangles there are after I've done the cutting and then beveling it outwards and aligning all the vertices. And now I'm going to cut around this little fabric panel because it does kind of have a little bit of a lip. So I think I want to include that on the low poly. Again, it does depend what exactly you're going for, you know, whether you want to include details like this on the low poly or not. I felt like at the time that I did want this detail in the low poly, but this one is really sort of I guess the word for it would be maybe borderline or I'm not sure. But you could go either way with a detail like this definitely. Either option would be okay. For a first person character, this is definitely something you would model in for, like, a current, you know, AA first person glove model, you'd probably have even more detail, to be honest. For a third person character, you know, maybe yes, maybe, no, it depends on the exact spects of the game. That's why I say it's a good idea if you're making your own models to just look at a game, especially if you have a studio in mind, look at their models. If you can get your hands on the wireframes, like maybe they're uploaded to art station in an art dump, sometimes artists include wireframes, but not always. It's actually kind of uncommon. I think partly that might be because it is a bit tricky to render wire frames because triangulated wire frames kind of don't look great in a portfolio. But by the time a model is finished, all of your wire frames will be triangulated because, you know, a rigged model is, you know, bakes. You need to triangulate before baking, and also the final rigged model is also usually triangulated. So I understand why there aren't quad wireframes or wireframes in general in dumps. And sometimes the wireframes are a bit of a trade secret. Um at least that's what I've been told from a few artists. So studios don't want to show off their wireframes too much because, you know, they have specific plugins. But that's more of a I think, an environment asset thing, or maybe it's nonsense. Who knows? You hear a bunch of things when it comes to this kind of stuff. So who knows? Yeah. So again, just using a push pull tool to push vertices above the surface of the low poly. You can see this is almost an exact match, but there are a few little differences like it's, you know, probably been smoohed around slightly with a move brush or something. So it doesn't take long to fix this up, really. Just to push the votes above the surface and then conform them back down, and then take a look at the panel lines and line stuff up that isn't lined up. So yeah, I'll spend a few minutes doing this. The inner side of the hand maybe isn't as important as the outer side because the inner side of the hand is always towards the body. It's never as visible. But even as I say that, you do need to make all of the parts look good, because, you know, if you decide that, you know, maybe there are some really low priority areas on the character, but if you make them look really bad ivory in your topology or your texturing or your sculpting, then they will stand out, and there'll be a lot more apparent than all of the pots that you've done really well. So even when I say, this area isn't as important as other areas and stuff like that, that doesn't mean you can put zero effort into it. It still has to look good, because if you make it look bad, then it will become more important than your good areas because everyone will see it, and everyone, you know, why does that look like that? Why does it look so bad? So yeah, even low priority areas, they do need attention and they do need to look good. Um, so I'm going to spend a bit more time cleaning all this stuff up. You know, it does take a while to fix all of this stuff that's been shifted around slightly, and, you know, just lining up this edge. Again, these are pretty important because when I'm going to be doing UVs, I'm going to be splitting the seams along these seams on the fabric on the high poly. Which is going to make texturing a lot easier and baking a lot easier if seams are along seams that are actually on the high poly because then they're basically not going to be visible or functionally not visible because, you know, that's where a seam would be in real life. So you don't really have to hide the seam. You don't have to work against the seam to make it not look like a seam because it is a seam, and you do want it to show up on the textures and the low poly and everything. So, yeah. Um, you know, these little bits in between the fingers, I've already said, are quite tricky. So I'm going to have to spend some time on those. Moving on back to this cuff area. The first thing I need to do is probably to shell the stop part, because I do need that thickness for it. There's a few polygons that I missed in my selection, so I'm going to have to fix those. But I'm going to shell it first and probably do those later. So just taking a look before I add the shell modifier and setting the inner amount to something that looks right, and then adding an edit poly so I can get to work on fixing this up and lining it up to the high poly. And, of course, you need to make sure that you're targeting the right high poly mesh when you're doing your all of your, you know, conforming and stuff like that. It's easy to have the wrong thing selected. Especially if you have a couple variants of the hi poly, maybe you have one where the back faces are deleted and one where they aren't think that's an issue I ran into in a few earlier chapters, and then you're getting confused as to why you can't snap to some of the faces, and, you know, it might turn out that those faces don't even exist on the hi poly you're targeting, and you might have a different hi poly visible to the one you're targeting with the freeform tools. So that's something to sort of remember to check for if you're ever having trouble with conforming. That's one of the issues that you might be running into. You might simply just be targeting the wrong high poly mesh. So right now I'm just doing a bit of cleanup on the shelled mesh, deleting the top faces that I don't need because I'll be welding those to the rest of the glove. And that's all I'm going to do for cleanup. Right now, I'm going to just head right into welding it to the other parts of the mesh. I don't want to be cleaning up parts that aren't completely visible. So now I'm just selecting an edge loop, a polyloop and growing the selection so I can hide these faces. And that so I can get to work on the inner side of the shelled part, and also so I can figure out the part where it welds to the rest of the glove. So you can see there's a little bit of cleanup that needs to be done here. And when it comes to these selections, the grow tool is really useful because otherwise, it would be extremely tricky to select stuff like this. And just growing out your selections is a great way to select a whole object. So right now I'm just trying to figure out what I want to see so I can get to work on attaching these two parts. It's easy to get confused, especially sometimes you can't tell which faces are front facing and which are back facing, what part you want to weld to wear. So yeah, be kind of careful and take your time. Also, it's quite annoying that some tools won't work on backfaces. Um, you know, like the knife tool doesn't work, and it's hard to select edges. I don't think back facing edges are selectable. Although this might be because I had ignore back faces turned on by accident. I'm not entirely sure at this point, but it is a little bit tricky to work with faces that are, you know, where the normal direction is facing away from you, so you're seeing the back of it. That's what a back face is. It's basically, you know, it's facing the opposite direction. So I'm just going to bridge this hole up. I'm doing these faces individually instead of bridging the two edge loops because I did a little bit of welding, and I'm not sure if there really are the same amount of edges on either side. And if there's, you know, more edges on one side than there are on the other, then it tends to not work. So the last thing left to do is to just do a weld by distance on these top edges, if you remember where I detached the top part of the clf from the rest of the glove, so I could shell it, and then I've attached it back in. So the point where I detached it is, you know, left separate. And, you know, the way to re weld it back to the main part of the glove is just to weld by distance with a really, really low distance, like, you know, 0.0 001, something like that. And that way, you make sure you're not welding any vertices that are close to each other by accident. So this is the glove pretty much done. And this is basically the end of the chapter. I'm doing a little bit of minor cleanup here. But, yeah, that's the whole process for this glove done. So yeah, the only really main thing I've been showing here is how to do that little cuff that's folded over on itself. If you don't do those tricks of detaching stuff and shelling it, then, you know, it would be a nightmare to retop of this as one object, which I'm sure some beginners have fallen into the trap of doing. And, um, yeah, there's probably a little bit of conforming left to do there on fingers, as you saw. I could take another pass at this glove, but this is all I'm gonna be doing in this chapter for now. So let me get rid of the original mirrored glove there from earlier. And I'm just noticing something that looks a little bit strange in this area. So I'm just going to fix it really quickly. Just going to cut across from these and weld those two edges together. That looks a little bit better. Okay, that's all for this chapter, and that's all for the right or left glove. Not sure which one it is. Thanks to watching. 32. 31 Arm Pouch Retopo: Welcome to Chapter 31. In this chapter, I'm going to be working on a few of the smaller details that are still leftover. Like, there's a couple bits of string and, you know, tiny stuff like that. That's going to be quick to clean up. And then I'm also going to be making a start on the pouch that's on the right arm. That's the last larger detail that I haven't touched at all yet. And, you know, once that's done, pretty much everything has had a first pass on it in terms of retopo and all that we'll be left to do is refine it a little bit and bring it all together and finish the retppo. But first, I'm going to handle all of these little details like this jaw string on the back of the hood. So this is a cylinder, and I've already said before that cylinders are nice and easy to retpper. So I'm going to go ahead and select all of the edge loops that I don't need. So the horizontal ones, well, in this case, the cylinders on its side, so they're vertical. You know, I can get rid of practically all of them. But for the ones running across the height of the cylinder, I have to make sure that I'm not messing up that hole in the middle of this thing. When I'm deleting them. So I need to make sure I'm not deleting the edges and make up the sides of that hole. So when I select every other loop, I have to go through and deselect the ones that make up the edges. So that's something important to look out for. And the ring select tools don't work ideally when you have breaks in the topology like this. You can see that they're kind of messing up the selection. I'm heading into Zebras to take a look at all of these little details to see if there's anything good I can take from the lowest subdivision level. Because a lot of these are like strings or cylinders, stuff like that, that often the lowest subdivision level of messures like that can practically be used as the low poly. I'm taking another look at this drawstring just to see if maybe there's a low subdivision level I missed and I could use instead, but there isn't. So I'm going to move on from that one, and I'm going to be looking at these bits of string you can see, these are quite usable. So I'm going to be exporting those for sure. Same with these on the front. So pretty much all of these parts, I can use as a base in my low poly or, you know, almost just use them as a base without really doing many adjustments at all. So these rope detailings on the pants, I covered this earlier when I was doing the pants. At first, I thought I was going to model them into the low poly, but then I decided that, actually, it would be better if I kept them as separate ropes. It'd be easier to texture them with a tiling texture and easier to bake, as well. So that's why I'm deciding to keep them. And I'm just going to go through the whole list of subtols and see if there's anything I've missed, anything I can use that will save me a little bit of time with modeling because as you can imagine, re topoing a length of string can be a little bit of a hassle, especially if you want the loops to be nice and even. So it's much better if I can export these low polys, which is what I'm doing now. And I'm going to go ahead and import them into my RDS Maxine and get to work on refining them a little bit and having them ready to be used as a low poly. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a new layer for this object that I'm going to import and name it appropriately and go ahead and import it. Okay. And you can see they're a little bit high still for a low poly. The low subdivision level wasn't that low. But, you know, like I said, cylinders are easy to fix. So I'm getting rid of the caps because the caps at the top aren't ever going to be visible. And then I'm selecting every other loop. And you can see, I redid my selection because you can select one set of loops or the other set of loops when you're selecting every other loop, right? And sometimes depending on, you know, sometimes one can be better than the other. If you've got a loop on the end that is maintaining the silhouette quite a lot for the end part, then it can be better to select the other loops that, you know, don't take that end into account, or you can just deselect the end loops and do them manually. That's an option. Now, for these little rope, not detail things, I could go ahead and re top them, you know, properly as, you know, separate, you know, go over and not have two intersecting rings here like they are now. You know, but that would take a bit of time. You know, I would save, you know, a handful of polygons. I take a little bit of time. It would make me maybe bake slightly better, but it's not really something I wanted to waste time on. It's basically not going to be visible in the final product. So that's why I only did a very quick just deleting every other loop for those two little, you know, knots on the end of the string. I'll see how they turn out when I bake. Like, if they bake horribly, then I will go back and retop them properly. But if they bake well, then, you know, that's time saved, and, you know, you're not just saving time, you're saving energy. Like, if you're gonna spend time retpoing every tiny little thing, then you'll get tired and, you know, Uh, if it's an insignificant thing like that, then, you know, don't waste time on it. But, you know, if I do the baking and I see that it's not working out in the bake, then I will go back and do it properly. So I'm cleaning up these little ropes here, just deleting the ends that are clipped so far into the pants so they're not visible. For now, and moving them a little bit further in if they're close to being visible. You know, if they're almost at the surface, I want to make sure that they really are deep in there and that they weren't turn visible. Now, because this rope detailing is sort of on the upper thigh, this area doesn't deform too much. The bits near the bottom of the knee might deform a little bit more, so they might present some trouble with rigging. But, you know, I can't really say right now how much of an issue they might be. I'm deleting every other edge loop here, apart from the ones near the middle, where the ropes twist over each other, and they bend because, you know, you've got a smaller bend there, and if I left that lower poly, then you would be able to tell that parts slow poly, right? I need a few extra Blyton polygons in the bend area here to make it look nice and round. So that's why I'm deselecting those and not deleting them. But all the others, I'm just selecting every other loop and deleting them because these are basically straight pieces of rope. Now, there's not going to be anything really to bake on these pieces of rope, actually, because the hi poly is just a flat piece of rope, as well. So there's not too much you would gain from baking these, basically, or nothing at all, really. So all the work on those is going to be done in the texturing and adding a normal map in substance painter, as opposed to baking them down. And that can actually be said for a lot of all of these rope details, basically, because, you know, you can't there's nothing to bake on them. If it's a smooth cylinder, um, you know, there's nothing to bake onto it. If it was if there was, like, some sort of height map applied to the hi poly or if there was sculpting work done onto this cylinder, then I would have to bake it. But in this case, I don't think I'll have to bake it, but, you know, we'll see once I get to the actual baking. So I'm going ahead and reducing the cap parts of these little ropes. So cleaning up these little plasticky details, getting rid of all of the horizontal edge loops and every other vertical edge loop, as well as usual. This should be low poly enough. Again, this is right next to the face, so I don't want it to look too angular, although, you know, maybe one or two edge loops here I could get rid of, but, you know, it wouldn't make a significant difference. When it comes to the end part here, um, I kind of want to leave a little bit of a bevel. So what I'm doing is I'm merging or welding together the two end edge loops or, you know, the bevelled edge loop at the top there. And that leaves the top part still has an extra edge loop, so it kind of stays a little bit rounded. It doesn't just end flat, which is maybe a little bit nicer. Than if I just got rid of both of them and had it ending at a 90 degree angle. But, you know, ever option would be okay. This is quite a small piece, so I'm not sure that makes a significant impact. But, you know, the choice is there. If you want it to look a little bit more rounded in the low poly, you can leave that extra edge loop, and a good way to do that is if you have two loops close to each other, you can just weld them by distance, but you have to sit your distances right. And it won't work if they're closer to each other horizontally than they are across. So it's something to keep in mind. What you could do in that case is add an edge loop between them and then delete the two side edge loops. So now back in the Zbrush file, I'm taking a look at the side pouch here to see what I can take from the high poly, checking all of the lowest subdivision levels. So I can probably take that little hard surface metal part. And also some of the other pieces seem like they might be usable. So I'm just going to go through the list and check what I can use and what I can't. Other than that, all of the little details, I think, I've done already. So all of the other bits of string should be ready to go. There might be something I've missed, you know. It's always easy to miss little details, but you end up finding them as you work along and get closer to, you know, retopp or baking. You know, generally, before I do my UVs, I will go through every single subtol on the high poly and check and see if I've included them in the low poly as well. So I'm working my way through the list of subtols hiding everything except for the parts that make up the armband. So that part seems like it's usable as a low poly, and so do these little straps. This one maybe not so much, but the others did seem quite usable. And now I'm exporting all visible subtols with the FBX exporter. And I'll import those into the three Maxine. And that'll be a good little start on some of the parts for the armband. The main part, unfortunately, wasn't as usable, so I'm going to have to do all of that from scratch. And I think this is the last major piece that is left on the low poly. And so everything once this is done, it'll just be a little bit of refining and matching stuff up. Oh, I guess the neck piece also isn't quite done yet. Moving back to these little details, I guess I forgot these earrings. Same deal as everything else, really, deleting every average loop. Because they're quite small. I think this even though this looks quite angular, this should be okay. Again, it's something I can double check once I get to baking and setting up my scene in marmosett. That's really when little details like this can be figured out. Because until you have your cameras set up in your render scene, and you can really look at stuff exactly how it is going to be in your renders. That's when you can tell if something looks like it's too low poly or otherwise. So it's good to keep in mind that this isn't a linear process, right? You will be going back and editing things you did earlier, even when you're at later stages in the project. So, you know, once I've done my bake, there's still a chance that I will have to go back to the retpper and edit things because there's just no way to check them until you have your bakes done and your cameras set up in the scene so you can see what's going on. Or, you know, especially in a more production environment, not working on your own pieces. When it comes to rigging, there's often a lot of revisions to topology, just because, you know, the guys that do the rigging and the character artists, you know, they're separate people and they're separate jobs, and they don't you know, it's hard to get it right the first time. It's a process of, you know, a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of testing something and seeing if it works. So yeah, it's not a linear process, so keep that in mind. Don't be afraid to just try something just to see if it'll work and then go back and fix it accordingly, according to the results you get. Now time to mirror this to the other side since the earring is done. Now, I'm not sure why I didn't just use symmetry or mirror this part for the other side. I must have thought that the rotation was slightly different for the earrings on either side, and that's why I decided to do it manually. So yeah, probably just got a little bit confused here and check that these parts were actually symmetrical, and I could have just done this in one click instead of having to tweak it into position. But again, remember that both of these low poly earrings should be instances of each other because I don't want to do the unwrapping twice. But for a part like the earring, it's not hugely important because you can place the low poly fairly easily, and it doesn't have to be super accurate. It's an earring. They should be offset from each other and not completely symmetrical. Nothing to worry about there. Now, moving on to the armband, finally. I can start doing the retail po for it. So I've got my folder with all of the armbnd parts separate, so that makes me organize things a little bit easier. And again, this is the same process when it comes to this cylindrical tube, just deleting edge loops I don't need. And then there's this little bolt detail here that it's small and flat enough to where it will bake down just fine because it doesn't protrude from the surface much. I didn't model it in at all. I'm just going to bake it down to that flat plane. So yeah, I'm going through and deleting every other edge loop. In some places, this does look severe and a little bit jagged, but this is a very sorry. This is a very small part when you look at the whole character. Again, if I do notice that some of these parts are kind of jagged, once I set up my scene in marmoset, like a little test scene to preview how the character looks once it's baked, then I will go and, you know, add a few extra edge loops to the low poly. It's not a big deal. Edge loops, especially if, you know, edge loops like this, they don't really affect the UVs at all. So, you know, sometimes you can add an edge loop and not even have to rebake if it's a subtle one. If it's something more extreme, then you kind of do have to because it affects your normals a little bit, and you can end up with a slightly bent, they call it, sometimes, normals, where you just get a slight gradient of a shadow in an area, and, you know, it doesn't look terrible, but it's noticeable that you have some sort of weird shadowing going on in an area if you've, you know, slightly changed the angles of your low poly to what it was originally, and your normals don't really match up anymore. So yeah, going through and quickly getting rid of all of the excess topology on these parts, I got rid of the holes that go through them because they're not really visible. So I'm just going to leave those as normal details on the low poly, so there'll be a little imprint of a hole on the normals, but there won't be anything going through the object because you can't see because there is that little metal tube or, you know, metal piece going through the holes, so you can't see the holes. No reason to keep them there and waste that extra topology. I do want to keep the ends quite round, though, so I can't go lower than that, although this is already quite low poly for them. So that part's done, basically, no. And I can just get rid of these few extra edge loops on these parts. Because it sort of all the ends sort of end in right angles, there's really not a lot of topology you need for a part like this. Now moving on to these caps. I can weld up, you know, every other vertice here. Again, on a tiny little detail like this, although you should definitely reduce it down, we're at the point where a few extra polygons do not make an impact on performance really at all. So uh, if you have a lot of parts like these, sometimes they will be skipped, even in a professional production environment. But for your portfolio, you should be trying to do the best job possible, avoid skipping too many parts like that. I don't have to do the same thing twice. I'm going to mirror it, and these parts aren't exactly mirrored. It's not an exact 180 mirror. Along the Y axis. So, you know, this isn't going to give me a perfect result, but it's going to get me some of the way there. And, you know, I'll just tweak it whatever's left to do. And that'll be close enough. I think I've said before, when it comes to baking, like, it helps to be, you know, you do need to get really close to, you know, the original position, but it's not, you know, pinpoint accuracy. You can get away with a little bit of eyeballing, I guess, as long as everything is lined up, basically, you know, So yeah, doing that trick where I put the pivot point on one corner and then adjust from there. That's the easiest way I've found to align things. If you have it in the middle, then every time you rotate things, you know, both of the ends move. So it's a lot harder to get stuff in the exact position you want, as opposed to just rotating one end. It's a lot easier to get your bearings. And this is getting there. It's pretty close to what I need. Now, alternatively, I could just bake only one of these and then skip, then I wouldn't have to be as precise when I'm placing the second one, if I only bake one of them and then duplicate it after it's baked. Of course, when you duplicate things after they're baked, one thing you have to do is on all your bakes, you need to basically manually, either you have them using the same part of the UV sheet or you manually duplicate that part of the bake, which is not ideal. Uh, you can sort of, you know, run into a few discrepancies when you're doing that. You have to be quite careful and you have to do it a bunch of times. It's a bit of a hassle. So when I can, I prefer to just duplicate the piece and bake it twice instead of uh, trying to duplicate it on the UV map. That might not make a lot of sense now, but it's one of those things that's tough to explain. When I say duplicate it on the UV map, I mean, you bake it once and then you have your normal map that got baked out and so you would have to copy paste the part you baked in the normal map to a different spot and then position the UVs for that part onto that new spot. That's how you get unique bakes without having to bake the same part twice. Um, generally, you want to avoid manually adjusting your bakes in Photoshop. It's it's better if you can just, if you don't adjust your, you know, sometimes you have to do it. Sometimes it's just quicker to fix bake in Photoshop than it is to get a perfect one straight out of the baker. It's just something that's not advisable because you can iterate a lot faster if your bakes come out perfect straight from the baker, right? And you don't have to manually adjust them in Photoshop because then every single other thing you adjust on the bakes, you will have to go and fix that in Photoshop every time you make a new bake or some sort of adjustment. So, but that's a little bit off topic. Let me get back to what's going on on screen here. So you saw that I tried to just retopo this area from scratch. But then I realized that it would be better if this was lined up with the existing topology of the arm. So what I've done is I've selected the entire area that the arm band covers on the arm, and I've duplicated it. And that's what I'm going to use as the base for this retopo. And that way, the topologies will basically be aligned. I'll have the same number of edge loops, and the edge loops will roughly be in the same place on the arm band as they are on the arm. Now, at this point in the process, I haven't decided whether I'm going to merge the arm band into the arm topology or keep it as a separate object. But that's a decision I'll have to make soon. Now, you can do both. But I would say keeping it as a separate object is probably a better idea, especially when it comes to skin because skin has its own shader, so it's going to be its own material, and it's just easier if you split up objects that are different materials to each other. You can have two materials on the same object. That's not a problem, but it's generally a little bit easier. It'll be easier for baking, too. An issue you might run into if you have these objects merged to each other when you're baking is that, um, it will sort of, you know, bake across, you know, it'll kind of look like it's fused into the skin, right? You'll have normals that go across from the arm onto this armband, unless you really add if you're really careful with modeling in the areas around the skin, then you can make it read as a separate object. But generally, if you bake these objects together, they will kind of look fused together and that's not what you want, especially on a AA asset, right? So that's why I end up going with these as separate objects. But, you know, there are cases where you don't have them as separate objects where you do combine skin and accessories into the same object and just apply a separate material to them. Both things happen, but I prefer to keep them separate. At least in this case, it's definitely preferable. And quite often also, it is. So that's what I would advise as a general rule of thumb, keep your skin as a separate object to any other mesh. So I'm roughly aligning some of the topology there to the features on this armband, because that's still something I need to do. Even though I want these edge loops roughly aligned with what I have on the body, they also need to be aligned with the features on the armband, and that's more important than the original topology of the body because this is quite a thick mesh. So the chance of clipping is not extreme, especially this area doesn't have too much defamation, so it's not something really I need to worry about. Uh, it's nice to have the same sort of flow of egg lobs as the rest of the body, but it's not super important. It's more important when you have two larry thin meshes on top of each other like layers of cloves and stuff like that. Generally, layering clothing is somewhat avoided entirely. You just completely remove clothes underneath each other. Unless it's something thicker like a coat that might flap around or something like that. But still, it's nicer to follow the underlying topology than to do something random that doesn't follow the meshes underneath it at all. It's still something better to do than something completely random. So, yeah, I'm trimming the edges around a bit as well, you know, all of the excess topology that I selected, but didn't really need for this. And I just added an extra loop there that follows the topology of the arm there. And this is more or less the base of this armband, pretty much done, right? It's a fairly simple shape, but it does have a few complicated areas in it, like the whole pocket assembly thing that can be a pretty tricky thing to figure out or decide how to do. But for now, I'm going around the edge and lining stuff up. Again, the edge is also a kind of tricky area because you can see it's basically two layers of thick fabric stacked on top of each other, and it can be hard to decide how to retple that if you're going to add extra edge loops for the second layer or not, or if you're just going to sort of hope that the normal map gets out across well enough in the bay So yeah, this is kind of a tricky match, to be honest. It's not like a nice flat, simple piece of fabric, unfortunately. There's a few things going on with it that make it a little bit trickier to do. Stuff like, those layers pieces of fabric that are very close to each other but not quite lined up, it can be a bit of a headache figuring out what to do with them because not quite different enough where you would want to add an edge loop to define and sort of model those areas out on the low poly. But also there is still that sort of variation in the surface to where you're not sure if just having that area flat will look great in the bake. Now, I mean, it will look fine in the bake regardless of which way you choose. Normal maps are great, and it's really impressive sometimes how much extra shadowing detail you can carry with just a normal map to where it looks, you know, completely natural and three D. But, you know, you want to include as much as you can in the silhouette these days. And, you know, that's the thing. Having a bigger polygon budget, it's a blessing and a curse because it, you know, there's so much more you can model in to your low poly without having to rely on a normal map to do it. And at the same time, many more decisions you have to make over what you're going to model in and what you're going to leave. If this was a 40,000 or 30,000 polygon budget, there would be no questions. I would just do it as one piece, and that would be fine and just bake everything down into really simple shapes. But now that I do have a budget that's, you know, over 100,000 for this character, that's what I've set aside. Basically, 100,000 up. I have to decide, you know, am I going to spend more time on extra details like that or not. Okay, so I'm roughly getting the shape of this sort of pocket in here. I've added edge loops for the sides of the pocket. So the sort of the main volumes in here already. And what I'm going to have to do is add more loops to define those shapes where it goes inwards in on itself and the sort of edges of the lid and all that. And, um, Yeah, that's something I'm going to have to start working on soon. But before that, I want to line everything up with the most external edges and then work on the sort of internal folds and little pockets and holes and whatever I have going on with this pocket. And that's a good way to approach these things, model the most extreme external points and then work on the internal points more. Because once you have the main volume in, then it's easier to cut the internal shapes into it. So, you know, you just saw me line up the sort of upper edge of this lid in and now I'm cutting in the bottom edge of the lid around that upper edge. And, you know, that more or less gets the whole shape of the lid done for me. Now I still the top corners I'm going to have to do a little bit later. Like this and then another loop to define that little pointy part where it sticks upwards. Then there is a little bit of an overhang here, so I need another loop to define that overhang. I want to include the overhangs because I think they will provide a nice shadow that a normal app wouldn't be able to provide. And I think that is what the Mario had intended when he was making the hi poly as well, because, you know, if you intend to bake something down, you generally want to avoid gaps like this. If you're just going to bake it down to a more simple plain shape. In this case, when there are bigger gaps, that's a good indication that the intent was to model these shapes in deeper on the low poly because otherwise it would be something that I would avoid and, you know, all three D artists would avoid when they're making the hi poly. Although sometimes, you know, it can just be an oversight when you're doing the high poly and you get to low poly, you realize that this area might be trip to retop to a lower topology level. It's definitely something I've experienced, especially when I was learning. I'd put a lot of hard work into making these shapes on the high poly, and then you get to low poly and you realize, you know, it's not ideal for baking. It looks cool on the high poly to have all these details and these little recesses and bit sticking inwards, but it's not ideal for baking. So again, that's something you have to sort of keep in mind. I think a lot of beginners can forget that all of these parts of the process are intertwined. It's not just do the high poly, then do the re topo, then do the baking. It's, you know, you do the high poly with the low poly in mind. You do the low poly with unwrapping and baking in mind, and you can always go back and forth between these things as you discover more things about the model as you're working on it. So now I'm working on this little trouble area where the pocket, you can see there's that sort of little cavity there, and I need to model it inwards a little bit to sort of get that effect of it looking like a real, you know, pockets that's being folded in on itself. Um, so it's kind of a tricky area because it is obscured by the camera and by other topology, it's hard to peek in there. It's hard to work on topology in that area, but it's something that will look quite nice once it's done to have that extra depth and cavity. So this is the blockout for the armband pocket thing, more or less done. You can see the main shape here and the main loops that are going to be on this pocket. So all that's left is detailing and adding in these extra concave parts and all these cavities, which, you know, it does take a while to do these, especially when you have complex concave parts like the top part of the pocket where you have all these parts coming together, but they don't all come together cleanly as one thing, right? They're all staggered and sort of offset from each other. So you have a bunch of detail there that, and it's all in a little cavity, so it's hard to reach with all the modeling tools and the gizmos. So it does take a while to model areas like that in places like this, you can see a lot of triangles converging on one spot, and it's a convex spot. So this part would typically not bake very well. I'm figuring out a way where I think, you know, a way that I think will bake better. So that is not having so many triangles converge on one spot that's so narrow. So something like this should work a little bit better. Again, it's hard to predict every time what's going to bake perfectly. That's why usually you want to come back and adjust your meshes a little bit after baking. But sometimes you get it right the first time around, and I'm hoping this will work quite well, but we'll see once I get to baking. So that's going to be it for this chapter. As I said, the blockout is more or less done, and I've started moving on to details in this chapter for one side of this pocket. The next chapters will just be me finishing up this whole armband. So that's all for this one. Thanks for watching. 33. 32 Finishing The Arm Pouch: Welcome to Chapter 32. So I'll be finishing up the armband pouch in this chapter. All of the base shapes are in already. It's all that's left is to do all of the sort of detailing into the low poly capturing more of the complex little nooks and crannies I have going on here. Like this little part where the pocket folds in on itself. Got to remember to have the surface target set properly here. So yeah, the drag tool is pretty much the only way you're going to be lining these up. You know, no brush is going to get it into the pinpoint precision you need for little edges like that. But it doesn't take too long. I mean, after all, this is just a low polyly. So at most, you know, there's a dozen or so edges that you have to do. Now, this is one of those corners, like I said, that are tricky. You have a couple parts overlapping each other. And, you know, you can sort of generalize that area and just leave it as a couple planes or you can go ahead and model in that little corner. And in this case, I decided to model it And I'm going ahead and cleaning up all of the edges. And, you know, once in a while, I will flick back to the other side that I've already done just to compare. Now, unfortunately, this part isn't symmetrical enough to do any kind of symmetry or mirroring or copy pasting of parts. So I'm going to have to do, you know, all of these parts separately. Even though, you know, I'm basically doing the same thing on both sides, it's just everything's out of position just enough to where it would be difficult to figure out if I copy pasted it, I feel like. And this isn't too big of a part to where a lot of time would be saved by copy pasting anyways. Um, so I do want to model in the depth of, you know, that concave area because I feel like that will look quite nice on the finish model. But this is the tricky area, right, where it all comes to a point at the top, and you'd see it's a cavity up there as well that goes all the way through, and that's definitely not something I want to model or bake because, you know, that'd be way too hard. I'm putting it off for now just because I know it's going to be a little bit tricky to figure out. So I'm doing this area here. I'm trying to avoid long thin triangles and I'm trying to avoid quads that sort of cross over two planes, if that makes sense. Sort if you can imagine a quad that's twisting over on itself. Um and especially if it's been triangulated in the wrong direction. That's something I want to avoid, at the very least, you know, cut it. So the triangulation is defined in the direction I do want it to be in. But ideally, you know, add extra geometry in that area to avoid a case like that altogether because stuff like that tends to read very poorly in the silhouette, especially if the triangulation is wrong. If it's a quad that see, one end is flat and then the other end is vertical. That sort of twisted quad, or if it's more than a 90 degree flip between the ends of a quad, that can generally it's not ideal, and it's something you want to avoid. But it all depends on circumstances as well. You know, a quad like that isn't breaking anything. It just might look bad. If it doesn't look bad, then it's fine. That's generally all there is to the low poly just make sure stuff doesn't look. Well, there's more stuff to the low poly. Of course, you need animation ready topology. So yeah, there is actually quite a lot to a low poly. I shouldn't have said that. That's all there is to a high poly. Of course, everything just needs to look good for a high poly. And the way you do it doesn't really matter that much. So I'm approaching this top area now. First thing I'm going to do is just connect everything to the endpoint and then see what I need to do from there, because either way, all these points are going to need to lead up to the endpoint in some way, and I need to figure out what extra geometry I need to add to sort of make that work better than it already does. So I'm adding this extra loop so that I can have this part actually conform to the suet and not be diagonal and sort of floating midair. You can see there's a little bit of an overhang between the lid of the pocket and the surface of the pocket, so this helps model that in. And you can see there's this quite nasty thing going on with this polygon here, and I need to add an extra cut or just delete the polygon and then fill that hole in with the whole fill tool, you know, or the cap button is what I meant to say there. And that's more or less fixed that issue. There's still a few engons in that area, but engons sort of a very easy thing to fix after you've figured out your main topology. You just go into the selection panel up at the top and select by side number and that shows you all of your engons and you can go through and correct all of them in one swoop. No need to sort of like if an endgon isn't really disrupting your topology while you're working, you know, if it's not making it difficult for you to make sense of the model while you're working, then I tend to leave it unless it's a very quick fix, just a single cut with the cuttle then I'll go ahead and fix it. But if it's something a little bit more than that, then I'll usually skip it and just leave it for the end to clean up all the engons at once. Okay, now the bottom of the pocket also needs an extra loop by it in order to capture that little step that forms from the layering of the fabrics. Um, I need to add another cut there because you see the stepping is sort of uneven and there's that extra little shelf that forms. And in order to capture that, you just need more topology. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, that's one of the advantages with the high poly counts. Now you can be less smart and just brute force things with topology if you need to. But generally, it's appreciated if you are more elegant in your solutions and you sort of figure out a clever way to keep the silhouette and also keep the topology low. Even now with budgets that are quite high. I think in a portfolio, that's very appreciated. But sometimes you just can't do that, or sometimes it would take too long to figure it out. I would suggest looking into, like, low poly models. Um, what I mean by that is not low pool in sense in the technical sense, but, you know, low poly style stuff. If you go to the Polycount form, they have, like, a whole thread or board. I'm not sure what that would be called, but on low poly art, which is like, you know, three D art style as if it was made for older generation stuff. Or, you know, low pool in the sense that it's really low budgets, so not AA, but, like, you know, just a couple hundred polygons for an acid. And you can see some, you know, really creative ways to sort of optimize models. Like, it's not all applicable to AA stuff, but you can see, like, interesting ways you can use topology. And also, it's kind of fun. To try some low poly stuff sometimes, but that's not what this tutorial is about, is it? So I'll get back to what's on topic. So I'm just adding a few more loops because this little fold sort of bulges upwards. And I thought it might be nice to include that in the silhouette instead of just sort of having it smoothly transition into that larger crease. You know, that little bit of variation in the silhouette might help a tiny bit. Now, the main shape is holding up quite well here already. Just a few more details to go really, and this part will more or less be done. Of course, I still have to give it thickness and give throughout the whole backside and the strap, but those parts are not fairly easy. I'm not going to be welding this part to the rest of the arm at all. It's going to be completely separate. Which, you know, I've detailed the reasons for that before, and I think I'll touch on them again once I get to baking and unwrapping. So just going through and looking for anything that catches my eye as something I could tweak a little bit. You see me messing with the placement of a few of these vertices, maybe not hugely important. They were more or less in the right place already, but it doesn't hurt to tweak things a little bit when you see them. I'm adding a two extra loops to this pocket just because I thought it was a bit light on loops before. It's quite a wide part, and it does have a little bit of surface radiation to it, so it was looking a tiny bit too flat before. Again, there is leeway on this, and it really depends on the whole what you're going for in your character. You could do this Civ away. That's the thing with retopo there are no hard rules. I mean, there's really no hard rules to any of the VD stuff. Um you know, it's it's not brain surgery. There's nothing really at risk if you mess something up here. So there's a lot of different ways you can do something. But, you know, try and keep it cohesive with the rest of your model. So, you know, I added a few extra loops to that pocket because the rest of this arm band is around the similar density as well, you know. So yeah, try and just make everything look like it makes sense in your models, really. So modeling in that pocket. Again, you can see me rotate the camera to see how it looks in the silhouette. And yeah, I'm aiming for quite a high amount of precision in the silhouette compared to the high poly. So I do want most of the silhouette to come across, whereas if you were on a lower polygon budget, you would get away with only keeping the larger forms and not working on every single pocket, which would still hold up fine with normal maps. Um you know, normal maps can make a flat surface look quite varied and really add folds to a lot of things. But yeah, I'm aiming for that little bit of extra quality and surface variation in my low poly as well. Just to keep to the modern standards, which are always getting higher and higher. It's always, you know, it's more and more work to make what is considered a AA character now, right? Whereas before, you know, for like a game, you would have, you know, sometimes just one guy making all of the characters. Now, it is a team effort to make one character in a lot of projects. It's, you know, some studios really compartmentalize. The character work though, I know from Ubisoft, I've definitely heard that, you know, a character is pretty much split up into individual parts, and there are separate artists working on all of them. It's more of like an assembly line setup, right, where you've got a lot of people working on different parts at the same time, which is, you know, helpful when you're working on a big project. Instead of, you know, waiting months for one character, which is, you know, that's how long you can expect to take on a A character project. Don't be afraid to, you know, at the very least, it is going to be a month unless, you know, you have a good base that you're working from. Like, maybe you can reuse a bunch of stuff from older characters or maybe your base meshes really suit what you're trying to make very well, and there's not a lot of modification you have to do on top of that. Maybe you have a good base mesh for your low poly, all sorts of stuff like that can make things take less time. You know, some pros, if there's, like, a pipeline already set up in a studio or some people, you know, really just like one style or type of character, and, you know, they just make lots of assets in that style, so it's something they're already used to, and they sort of have a pipeline for that kind of stuff. They can produce stuff a lot faster. But whenever you're making a character from scratch and maybe it's not a subject matter you've done before, it does take a while, and it's nothing you should really worry about, especially when you're learning. Don't worry about taking too much time. Instead, I think the quality of result matters a little bit more in that case, when you're still starting out. So once you can reach the sort of quality you want, then you can go for trying to get faster. But you probably will be pretty fast by then without having to separately, you know, try and figure out how to speed up your workflow just because of, you know, all the time you've spent figuring out how to make a nice looking character. So yeah, I suggest not worrying about those things too much. Just take your time and try and get a good result. I'm trying to figure out what to do with this edge. You can see it sort of doesn't quite meet the surface of the pocket there. And I'm trying to decide whether it's worth modeling that little gap in or just letting it bake over this sort of leave it slightly distorted on the low poly. You can see, um, I end up settling for modeling in that gap. Not all the way through, because further down, it gets closer to the surface of the pocket, and it's also covered up by that little hanging piece. But yeah, those areas are tricky when you have something that is quite close to the surface but not quite on it, and you have to decide what you're going to do with the gap. Because a lot of the time, you can bake the gap down, but sometimes it will look a little bit hanky if it's too far or if it's quite visible. So I'm giving this part thickness now, and the way I did that is I selected the entire open edge. You know, that's the third selection mode. It's bound to the number three. I think it's called hole selection or I don't know. But it selects open edges. So whether it's a hole or, you know, the exterior of a single sided mesh, that's what it will select, and it will select all of the open edges on a mesh. In this case, that's the exterior edge of this mesh, and then just control shift drag to extrude it downwards. Oh, well, these are basic SNAX commands. So I'm guessing everyone already knows this by now. I've used it a lot of times. And the reason I'm doing this instead of using shell is, of course, because I modeled in a bunch of pocket and all sorts of details up at the top. And if I shell that, then I would have to delete all of those. So it's faster for me to just extrude and model out the backside instead of shelling it and then deleting a bunch of excessive topology. I'm adding an extra loop around the top, not really an extra loop, just an extra edge around this top area where all of the parts converge, just so I can use that spot to sort of weld some of those points together, so I don't have so many triangles merging into one point. And so I can sort of have a little bit of a straight edge there. Instead of just converging triangles in this sort of really sharp and it ends up being quite jagged because if you think all of these points are converging to one point. So on the other end, you know, if those points are out of alignment, you end up not with a flat plane, but with a sort of zigzaggy plane on the other side of those triangles. Which is something you definitely want to avoid. So that's why it helps to, you know, add an extra edge and reduce them down a little bit before they come to that point. Now I'm working on the back side, so just cutting across from either side to link up those vertices, and I can be pretty rough here because it's on the back side, it won't be visible. Um, I'll add two more vertical edge loops, and that'll make it a little bit easier to model the ends because, you know, at the ends, it will transition from, you know, those multiple edge loops to make that curve round to just a few, three. So I need to, you know, have that little transition in the amount of edges, and I would like to keep the very edges still looking quite round and nice on my base because, you know, that part will actually be visible. The rest of the middle of the shoulder band will not I'm going to keep the horizontal density of the edge loops just to, you know, follow the topology of the arm underneath it and the topology that is above it, more or less. That's generally good practice on parts that are kind of thin like this in terms of, you know, avoiding parts clipping through each other when they're deforming. This part probably isn't going to deform much at all because it's on the middle of the arm. And generally, when you rig pouches and stuff, you tend to weight them more rigidly and not have too much flexing because, uh you know, generally wouldn't flex in the real world either that much. Even if it is a fabric part, it's not on a part of the body that bends too much, so it's probably not going to really bend when you rig it either. I could reduce the amount of polygons on the back side a little bit more. But again, fortunately, as you'll often find that, you know, they do get a little bit lazy in reducing polygons just because it's not super important anymore. A couple hundred polygons does not make a difference on modern hardware or modern game engine. So now moving on to the arm band. Same thing you've seen me do before deleting a bunch of unnecessary edge loops. And the only thing I'm really worried about is the very edges of this armband. So because the internal parts are just flat. I added an edge loop in the middle, just following the topology of the arm below it, because there's an edge loop right there in the middle on the arm underneath this arm band as well. And now I'm deleting the vertical edge loops. I'm doing this manually and lining them up to the edge loops on the arm because that way I will avoid any sort of jaggedness on, you know, there's if edge loops are differently spaced on a part that is lying above another part, it will sort of look the very line where those parts meet will end up being kind of jagged. So it's best to align the edge loops of two different parts that are above each other. So that's what I'm doing. And, you know, it's not exactly an automatic way to do that because these were modeled separately. They have a different number of edge loops. So I'm going to have to go through control McSpace to delete edge loops that unnecessary. And the ones that are close enough to the arms edge loops, I will use edge constraints to shift into the exact position I need. And now I'm lining up this internal edge loop with the second strap that goes above this one, I'm just going to extrude outwards to get that second strap. I'm not going to model it separately. It's just going to meet an extrusion on the surface of this one. Uh, so lining all of these letses up. And, luckily, they were already quite close to where they need to be. Here I accidentally used the conform brush while edge constraints were on, so I messed up my edges a little bit, and I'm not sure if I realized that, you know, if I would have realized, then I would have undone, turned off edge constraints and used the conform brush again. But in this case, probably didn't realize, and I just fixed it with a tractor. Now, here I'm adding some edge loops where that little strap ends. You can see that it doubles back on itself and then goes above the surface again. So although I did say that I was going to model this top strap into the surface of the bottom one, for now, I am going to use the imported low subdivision level as a base instead of just extruding outwards because I noticed that there's those little loops at the ends that I want to keep and also this part where it, you know, doubles back on itself, where there's two layers of this strap. I realized that I could make this part a little bit easier if I, you know, just used that base and welded these two sections together instead of, you know, starting from scratch and extruding and modeling everything from there. So, yeah, I want to keep the little loops on the ends, and I want to merge this middle butt together. And once I've done that, I will delete the backside and weld it into the surface of the strap below it. So I'm going to do a point to point selection of these edges. So that's with the shift key clicking down and then clicking a second point and then releasing the shift key, if I remember correctly, and then just welding by distance. I'm leaving the last vertices not welded together, so I so I can manually position that last vertex because, you know, you want it precisely positioned in a spot where it, you know, you don't want it obvious that these straps have been merged together in this middle section. And to do that, that last vertice needs to be positioned a little bit inwards, a little bit further in to where the strap suckles together. So the sort of change in angle is a little bit more gradual. But again, this is really close up, so it's not really something you should be fretting over too much. It's barely visible. And that's a good thing. You don't want this transition to be very visible because it's very small, so No one's really going to be, that's the idea that no one notices that these two straps get merged into one at some point down the length of this strap. Now filling in this last hole. That was left over. Parts like this are tricky. You sort of have to do it blind, sort of remember what kind of topology was going on in there. Now I'm lining up the edge loops of this top strap to the bottom one because like I said before, I'm going to be merging these down to one object. And that's going to be a lot easier if all of the edge loops are aligned before I attach these objects to each other because then welding the vertices to each other will be trivial. So, yep, just turning on edge constraints and control backspace to delete the edge loops that I don't need anymore. And I can reduce the edge loops around the holes a little bit, because it's a very tight curve, it still needs to be a little bit more dense than the other parts. And in some cases, you know, instead of deleting every other loop, what you can do is delete one loop and then move some edges around to make it look a little bit more round than it would be if you just deleted those edge loops. It can help to move edge loops a little bit closer in to that part where it really gets round. Like you can see I'm doing here. Again, this isn't hugely important because this is a very tiny area that isn't hugely visible. So don't waste a lot of time making sure that the ends of those loops are looking perfect because, you know, this is only apparent in such a close up angle. In renders it won't be very apparent. Now I want to do weld these parts up as well, and do that, I'm hiding the selection. So I can delete these backfaces. Again, a little bit of a tricky area. Because I have the showcage turned on, I still have my wireframe, even though I hid the faces. So I can use that wireframe to weld these points to each other. But I've unhidden everything now, so that doesn't really matter. I'm going to spend some time cleaning up the individual vertices here, moving them around a little bit to better suit the shape. Make some really minor adjustments. I'll go through and weld up a few of these excessive points. I definitely don't need so many across the ends of the strap here. Again, you can see that there's a little bit of a vertex normal issue going on there. I'm leaving it for now. I'll fix it with an add normals modifier once I'm done. These things just happen when you're, you know, welding a lot of stuff up. The normals get messed up if you're making a lot of changes to the surface. Uh, although I will say that in this project, I've been having, you know, these vertex normal issues have been popping up a lot more than on previous projects. I'm not really sure what's going on there. Maybe it's something to do with three Max 2022. Um, I've recently upgraded to this version, so I'm not sure if that's a bug or something. But vertex normals aren't really something that you should worry about unless, you know, for some reason, the edit normals modified doesn't fix them. In that case, um, you know, that hasn't really ever happened to me, but you can try exporting and importing the files and a few other things if you have stuff like that happening, but I don't think it should. Okay, back to the topic at hand. I'm welding the strap to the main armband now. And you can see since I lined up all of the edge loops, this is going really quickly. Of course, before I attach these objects to each other, I made sure to delete both the backside of the strap and the front edge loop of the underlying strap. So I'm going to carry on working my way around all of these vertices and welding them up. I'm probably going to have to revisit these verts a little bit later because one thing that is happening is the bottom verts of the top strap aren't lined up with the surface of the bottom strap. So, when I'm welding, I'm sort of moving the faces that represent the surface of the bottom strap upwards a little bit, if that makes sense. Because I'm welding upwards to the top half of the gap between the top strap and the bottom strap, and I'm probably going to want to move those vertices down back to the surface of the bottom strap. I feel like that will bake better. Now welding up the backside of the little loops on the end. You know, this part isn't as matched up as the others. I'm having to add a few extra cuts to accommodate all of the extra tess in this area. But, you know, it's not that much. Just one or two cuts here and there. Not really bothering to add a full loop through the whole belt, and that's unnecessary. I just need to cut in a triangle to add that extra verts wherever I need it. So now I'm going back and adjusting all of these vertices. You can see this is sort of giving a better impression of the thickness of the top strap when I go through and adjust these a little bit, because before some of the volume was sort of getting lost. I could go through and use the conform brush as well, but I want these vertices to really be on, you know, precisely on the edge between the top strap and the bottom strap in order to get a nice, good bake. And that's, you know, the best way to do that is to manually line up every single vertex. Again, there aren't that many years, so it only takes a couple of minutes to go through and, you know, do a good job of this. And you can see there are places where the gap gets bigger. In those spots, I'm going to move the vertices down a little bit into the overhang, and that's going to give the impression that this strap is above the surface, that it's not, you know, directly touching the other strap. You know, it will give the impression of the gap without me having to model everything in there and actually make it a cavity. So that's a good work around for these areas, and I've used it a few other times before in this tutorial series. So that's this strap pretty much done. And now I can move on to whatever's left. And I think the thing I'm going to approach next is there's a few loose hanging straps that I need to take care of here. Like this one that is coming out of the bottom of the pouch. So a lot of it is clipping into the inside of the pouch, and obviously, those edges I'm just going to delete, because they're completely unnecessary. And I can get rid of a few of the ones from the sides. And all of the vertical ones, pretty much. I mean, of course, I do need to keep a few, and I do want to keep a bit of roundness around the edge. So what I did there was I selected the two edge loops that run around the side and did a distance world on them to turn them into one point. I deleted the entire end because I'm going to have to remodel that part. It would be more work to use the existing vertices there than to make them from scratch. So I just deleted that end part, and I'm just keeping this section. Rotating the edge loops a little bit, so they make more sense, and they're a little bit more even. So I'm going to clean up these edge loops a little bit more. And for the bottom part that I deleted, I'm just going to extrude downwards and model it as one chunk. I'm not going to bother, you know, modeling the strap actually curving on around itself. That's just going to be baked down detail into the texture as opposed to actually being modeled in because, you know, it's excessive. It's not necessary, especially for a part that's small. If it was like a strap in a very visible area and it was slightly larger, maybe belt sized, then I would consider this or like, um up on the arm where the armband has those little bits of metal that go through the loops on the ends of the strap there because those holes are a little bit wider, in that case, you know, I wanted to model those in. In this case, you know, there's no real gap there, so this can break down perfectly fine. So I really just need to cut in a few edges to let me have that little step where it gets thicker from, you know, getting bent or, you know, from where that second layer is. And that should be perfect for the low poly of this object. And that more or less does it for this little strap. Just maybe going to add an extra loop because it does sort of you know, it sort of curves inwards a little bit there. And I'll isolate a little vertice that I can bring inwards here as well. Although this is maybe a little bit excessive, maybe I got a bit carried away from being zoomed in on this tiny part here too long. You could probably just leave it how it was a little bit earlier without this section that goes inwards, and it would also be fine. Now for the end cap, I just cap to the end with the cap button, and then I added that little loop that goes through it. And, you know, adding those extra corners so the corners can curve outwards as well, and this should Now, there's always a little bit of tweaking you can do for individual vertices, you know, just with the rag tool and, you know, moving stuff around a little bit to make it fit the form of the object a tiny bit better. So you can always spend a little bit of time tweaking things like that. For the strap on the pocket, I'm just modeling it straight into the surface of the pocket. Now, because this little thing, it's little you know, hanging, it's not a strap. It's really called something else, but I can't think of the name right now because it's so close to the surface of the pocket, this works fine. But in hindsight, I would say that I probably should have kept it consistent with the other straps I've done and molded it separately. Which is, you know, maybe something I'll do once I get to baking. I'll bake this piece, and I'll see how it looks. If it looks fine and basically like a separate piece once I've got it baked down, then I'll keep it the way it is. But if it looks like it might be better as a separate strap, then I'll go ahead and just really quickly model it in later after I've done the test bakes. So the last thing I'm going to do in this chapter is these two straps that go on the glove. So I'm disconnecting the ends of this little strap here so that every other ring select tool works a little bit better. When you have topology that is a little bit more complex, it tends to not work, and it will either loop around and select every single edge, or it will really mess up the edge selections towards the ends where the topology is less where the topology is more complicated than just even loops going around, right? Now, in this case, it was a little bit unnecessary because as you'll see on the other strap, it works fine without having to disconnect the ends. So in this case, it wasn't necessary, but, you know, on other models, it can definitely be, you know, impossible to use every other ring select tool otherwise. So it's a good little trick to remember. You know, if one part is giving you trouble when you use every other ring select tool, you can just disconnect that part from your mesh, make your selections, and then reattach it later. So that's all for Chapter 32, and the little shoulder pouch is done now. So on the next chapter, I'm going to be moving on to a new part, and we're actually getting really close to finishing up the low poly, as you can see here. Thanks for watching. That's all. 34. 33 Finishing The Mech Arm Part1: Welcome to Chapter 33. In this chapter, I'll be finishing up the mechanical arm parts. If you remember, they weren't quite finished when I left off. There's a little bit of detailing work to go, and I have to connect all of the parts of the mechanical arm up. So that's all that's really left to do. The main structure is there, and most of the details have a start on them, but maybe there is, you know, a little bit of edge work that's not quite right, and some vertices need to be aligned along the edges still. But, you know, the bulk of the work is done. This is going to be a lot of cleanup mostly. So I cleaned up my scene a little bit there so I could sort through all of my objects a little bit easier. And now I'm going to go ahead and sort of look at what I need to do here. I'm going around a bit here and lining up vertices to the sort of things they should be lined up with on the high poly. And you can see the sort of top edge of this forearm part isn't quite done. A lot of the topology towards the ends of these parts, especially where the peaks, poke out isn't quite right, and I need a little bit more resolution around these curved areas as well. So that's what I'm going to start handling now. I'm lining up all the vertices with that second little like, sort of hard line. You know, there's a little bit of an indent along the top of the edge here, which adds a little bit more complexity, which means I need to add second edge loop to sort of capture that volume because it's sort of rounded shape around the edge. Of course, there's that part where it sort of goes inwards. It's quite a harsh grease on the hi poly as well, but I'm not going to be modeling that in. I'm just going to be baking that down because that's too small of a detail, and I think the normal map will make it look fine. So I'm going to go ahead and line all of these vertices up across the forearm here. I'll spend a few minutes doing this. Now, down here, I feel like I could use an edge going across from those two indents, and that would make the topology look a little bit more even and maybe help with the sort of curvature you have there on the forearm in that area because it was looking like, you know, it was a little bit sparse compared to other areas. And also, I've got this curve in the panel lines here, and that definitely needs some extra geometry in order to look properly rounded. So I'm going to add a few cuts in there to really, you know, make it look smooth and not jagged. And from this distance, that looks reasonably round to me. So that'll be enough. It looks like I need another one here as well. So I'm going to add that in. And I'm also making sure to align all of the vertices pretty precisely on the edge of that sort of, um, you know, the edge of the panel lines. You generally want to keep things even here. So you sort of need to get an eye for where exactly on the edge. You put your vertices, especially when you've got a slightly more rounded edge. Like here, there's no, like, sort of pinpoint area. You can put your vertices, so you have to sort of eyeball it and try and make it as even as you can. Sort of guestimate where on that sort of curved edge your vertices should be and keep that even across the whole edge. Now, up here, I'm also adding a few edges to make this part look more curved, as opposed to being all jagged. And I'm also trying to line up the vertices with the surface of the underlying mesh. Now for these two, I am going to be welding them together because these two parts are so close together, you know, it's only a tiny little seam between them, and that will look better if I just bake it into one mesh as opposed to, you know, having two separate objects really close to each other. And then, you know, you'd have to cap the ends off and stuff like that. So these parts are going to be merged into one, which is, you know, quite similar to what I've been doing for a lot of this model. All of the parts that are sort of, lumped in really close to each other or attached to each other. I weld down into one object on the low poly. So I'm going in, adding in the extra vertices I need in order to weld this up with the top part. A pretty straightforward process. Not really anything to say here, really. So you can see around the front here, the gap between the bottom of the forearm and the top gets a little bit bigger. There's also that little panel down there. So that area is quite complex, and I'm going to leave it for a little bit later. I don't want to try and figure that part out yet, go to move on to more simple areas. Um, so this area, you know, it's quite straightforward. I can pretty much just weld vertices straight to each other here. Around this corner, it's a little bit more complex. The issue here is, you can see the edge flow isn't quite perfect. You know, according to the shape of this object, the edge loops are sort of moving in a different direction. And you can see along the back edge of this forearm piece, they're, you know, getting really spread out, and they're also flowing diagonally, compared to the surface of this actual object. So that's definitely something I'm going to have to adjust. And sort of re route them to make them a little bit more even and to make them follow the surface of this object a little bit better. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have an edge loop running sort of along the outline of the bottom forearm piece, at least for the edge around here. And that's generally, you know, a good idea if you're stuck on how to do topology in an area like this. Generally, if you have, like, a sort of boundary between two parts, it can be a good idea to sort of have another edge loop outlining that boundary between two parts. That's definitely a good start to figure out the topology of an area. And this second loop, I'm going to route sort of to this side where there is a real lack of edges, in my opinion here. And you can see this sort of following the shape of this part a lot better as well. And this is more or less how I'm going to fix the topology in that area. You can see that definitely looks a little bit better than what I had going on there before with all those edges stretching downwards. Now, I'm also going to add a few edges to sort of outline the outer edge of this part. So in general, like, a good point for topology is, do you have edge loops to outline harsh boundaries or the outer edges of your parts. And, you know, once you have those outlines in, it's a lot easier to figure out all of the topology that goes on in between them, you can sort of just link those two outlines up or something like that. But yeah, in general, it's a good idea to have an outline of an outlining edge loop around, like harsh transitions or boundaries or edges or, you know, the ends of an object, stuff like that. So that's kind of what I'm doing here. I'm going around and editing the flow of the topology a little bit so that in most places I sort of have an outlining edge loop around this, um area where the bottom part of the forearm joins this top section. Now, you know, it doesn't go all the way around in some places, I sort of break this little outlining edge loop, you know, where it's not as important in, like, a more flat area, or if, you know, that area doesn't seem like, you know, the existing topology seems good enough and that outlining edge loop doesn't seem all that necessary. Then, you know, I might skip it in those areas. You know, it's not a hard rule that you need that sort of edge loop. I just find that it's in a lot of places, it can really help fix any sort of topology issues you have. But, you know, it's not something that's mandatory, it's something that you need to do. So there's places where I sort of break it off or where it's sort of just, you know, goes away for one reason or another, like you know, the flow of the topology changes, but it's still good enough to where I don't need that outlining edge loop. Now, looking at this pocket area, you can see that yeah, this is going to be a little bit troublesome, especially with how tight of a space it is. So what I'm going to do first is go ahead and add a few extra edges to this rounded part on the bottom. You can see that it definitely needs a few more to actually look rounded. So I'm just adding a few triangular cuts near the edge of this object just to add some more geometry to the very edge of the rounded part. And I'm going to start bridging across to the top part of the forearm here. So just bridging across to where it makes sense. And once I bridge across, then I will be able to tackle the sort of cavity that goes downwards there, if you remember. Now, it is a little bit hard to see here because I've got all the wire frames turned on. So I'm going to hide the high poly because I don't really need it to bridge between two objects. I only really need to see the low poly for this part, so this makes it a lot easier to see what I'm doing. And right now I'm mainly concerned with, ah, bridging in this hole and making it make sense. So I'm welding up some vertices that aren't really contributing all that much and adding in cuts for places where, you know, I need the extra geometry to weld to the other part or where I need a little bit more roundness on my low poly as well. In this case, you know, luckily, both of those things are pretty much in the same spot, right? I've got this curve that I need to make look rounder, and I also need a little bit more extra geometry to weld into this little detail panel down here. Now for the little cavity that goes downwards, I'm just going to move these vertices downwards into that hole a little bit and you can see that the hole actually closes up down there. So that makes this one pretty easy to figure out. It's, you know, that's pretty much how deep I will make this little cavity. So, it didn't turn out to be all that tricky after all. And details like this, I actually like making them. They are, you know, a little bit more work when it comes to Retopo, but it is always nice to have some sort of layering going on in characters, I feel, at least, and it's something I end up doing a lot. When it comes to my own personal projects, it's nice to have that sort of layering of objects where you have one object going in or underneath another one. That always looks cool on models, in my opinion. But yeah, it is a little bit of extra work when it comes to doing the retopo and figuring out the topology. So keep that in mind when you're picking your concepts. I'm welding up a little bit of the unnecessary extrageometry that's here. You can see this is quite a flat part, so it definitely doesn't need all of these edge loops. Of course, the two corners of this little piece do curve around, so they kind of do need that extrageometry, but the middle part definitely didn't Now what I'm going to do is cap off the top of this mesh, and that's because I don't want any holes showing up. If I have my character posed and maybe it's at some odd angle where suddenly a hole appears and you can see right through this armor mesh into the background or the environment. That would be really annoying. The best way to ensure that doesn't happen is to just cap off all of your meshes wherever there's a chance that that part might be visible. And then that way you definitely won't have any holes showing up in your renders by accident. And the way I did this is I just, you know, used the cap button for that entire hole, and now I'm just cutting some edges across to sort of make that end gone make a little bit more sense. As soon as you add a few more edges, it will, you know, get more defined and behave more the way you would expect it. Whereas when you first, cap off, like, a really oddly shaped hole like this with a bunch of sides, you know, the resulting end goon will be doing all sorts of wacky things, but as soon as you subdivide it up into a few sections like you saw there, it starts making a lot more sense. And in that area, the topology isn't super important because, you know, well, in the first place, this is a non deforming part. And also the area that I'm capping off, it's basically not really meant to be visible. It just, you know, there might be some very thin segments that might end up visible if this arm is posed or something like that. Really, that cap is just there to, you know, ensure holes like that don't show up. That part I don't really intend to make visible. So I'm not too worried about the topology in there. You know, I'm probably just going to paint it black in the ambient occlusion and give it a dark albedo to just make it look like a shadow later on. Now I'm noticing that some of these details are a little bit unfinished. I need to add a few more edges around this little um, little detail here and sort of integrate it better into the rest of the topology. There's also a few more edges I need to add around this panel line area thing just to make it look more round. A, for this whole arm, you know, it's going to require a similar layer level of detail pass for the rest of this arm because I left it in this semi finished state. And yeah, hard surface stuff does need a little bit of attention in order to look quite nice. Especially if it's something very shiny or metallic or mirror like in surface. In that case, you need to have a very even flow of topology in order to not affect your reflections. Even if it's a completely flat surface, if you have a lot of edges converging on one point, a lot of thin triangles all converging on one point, that will affect the reflection, even if it's a perfectly flat surface sometimes, um, because reflections are really, you know, reflections and glossy highlights are really sensitive to even, like, extremely tiny variations in surface normals, and it will sort of skew any sort of highlight or reflection you have going on. So that's something to keep in mind if you're working on a very shiny surface, whereas a lot of time you can be quite aggressive in optimizing flat areas on hard surface models. You can't really do that with a reflective surface, and it's definitely a big issue if you're trying to model something like a car or a vehicle that has glossy paint. It's something to keep in mind. I guess to sort of sum up what you should have in mind if you're modeling something very glossy or something that's meant to be very shiny as a low poly model is it's somewhat similar to re topologizing deforming objects in that you need very even edge loops. But of course, you don't need edge loops in areas that are completely flat and straight, whereas you would need them in a deforming model if that area deforms, even if it is perfectly flat, if it deforms, you still need edge loops to support the deformation. On a hard surface, shiny objects, you sort of need to follow the same principles of edge flow, but in flat areas, you don't need extra edge loops because they're not deforming. But if it's some sort of like sci fi metallic thing that does deform, then, you know, you basically re topologize it like you would an organic, soft surface object. So I'm optimizing this little panel down here a little bit. I'm going to keep those three internal edge loops because you can see that this little panel does sort of curve around a little bit. It follows the whole curvature of the general forearm. Of course, this entire object is somewhat cylindrical. So I do need to keep up a regular amount of edge loops going vertically along this model just to support that. So that, of course, limits the amount of vertical edge loops I can get rid of. And the same vertically because it bulges outwards to the top and then goes inwards towards the bottom. If this was a flat straight cylinder, I could get rid of a lot more topology. But in this case, I do still have to keep things pretty dense because this entire object is, you know, made up of compound curves and bulges and all sorts of stuff. So it's actually looking quite similar to how I would re topologize a soft surface object, just because of all of the shapes that are in this. If it was, like, made up of flat pieces of, you know, metal or flat parts, like a gun or something, then, you know, it would look slightly differently. But some of the stuff that I'm doing around these sort of panel lines is, you know, the same kind of stuff I would be doing on a more conventional, flat hard surface object where I'm adding a bunch of topology near curved areas to support those curves. So now I'm cleaning up this little hole down here. Like I've said before, areas like this are kind of tricky because you can't really see what you're doing, and you sort of have to reach in there. It's almost funny how you end up with quite similar limitations to how you would be if you were working on something like this in real life, you know, struggling to work inside a tiny little hole. Of course, in three D, we have the advantage of being able to hide messages or turn them transparent. So that makes things a little bit easier than real life, right? So the way I like to handle figuring out how to close up the holes on places like this is to first cap the entire hole off, and that lets me just play around with the cut tool and figure out what I need to do with the hole from there on. It's a lot easier than trying to bridge things and think ahead about how you're going to handle closing up that hole. Instead, yeah, I prefer to just close it with an endgon and then look at how I'm going to subdivide that endgon into cleaner topology. So right here, you can see, I'm trying to get the topology to sort of match that direction of the surface. You can see sort of tapers a little bit there, and I want to have a few loops following that. If you remember previously in a different area, the topology was actually going slightly diagonally according to that sort of taper in the mesh, which is what I want to fix with the topology here. Down in this area, I'm just reducing the amount of polygons there because I don't need all of them. There isn't that much curvature in that area. So in some places, I am reducing it. But there is a limit to how much I can functionally reduce because I have curves at both the top and the bottom of this little piece. So it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to reduce all of the polygons down in this tiny gap between the bottom and the top curves. So that's why I'm keeping this part a little bit more dense than maybe it would be if those top curves and the bottom ones were further apart, because you can see there's only one or two edge loops between them. So, you know, if I reduce all of these vertical edge loops down in the middle, and then I have to, you know, expand upon them again, when I get to these top curves where the forum connects to that cylinder, you know, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. All I'm saving is maybe a couple hundred, maybe even less than a couple hundred triangles. It's a bunch of extra work, and it's not ideal for really the topology. So that's why I'm just keeping most of these loops straight there in the middle. And that's why that area is ending up looking a little bit more dense than perhaps other places. But you can see here, there's only two loops going horizontally. While, yes, I can reduce them down a little bit. There's only so much space between that bottom curved part and the top one to where it, it doesn't make a huge impact. But yeah, I am getting rid of every other unnecessary edge loop here. And again, if maybe the distance between these two curves was larger, I could optimize it a little bit more. But, yeah, I'm going to add a horizontal edge running between those two parts here because all those triangles between these two parts looked a little bit messy to me, and this will probably make this part a little bit smoother and a little bit tidier. Again, there's a vertex dense curves at the bottom and the top of this little piece. So there's only so much optimization I can do between those two parts. I'm going to go ahead and hide some of these high poly and low poly meshes of the elbow so I can see what I'm doing at the top of this piece here. And now that I've cleaned up my scene a little bit, I can go ahead and finish up these very corners. Now, I want to strike a balance between making them too dense and making them too angular. It's easy to get bogged down and too zoomed in and make things way too dense compared to other parts of the mesh. I'm straightening out some of these edges because these sort of edges that are going diagonal compared to the surface of the model aren't very productive. You want to straighten stuff like that out so that they're running perpendicular to the edge or that they're coming off. And I want these nice crisp curves at the top of the elbow. Generally, just trying to keep things evenly spaced here. And I'm getting rid of the few edge loops that are a little bit excessive in these areas. Again, another thing you can do is just, you know, get rid of an edge loop quickly and see what the result looks like. And if it looks like there's maybe too much optimization, you can always undo. So yeah, just try things. Don't worry. You know, there's no use trying to figure out if it will work in your head when you can just quickly try it, and then if it doesn't work, you can always undo. And, you know, that's how you're going to learn these things the fastest, as well. Just do them, try them. And if they don't quite work, then, you know, just try again. So I'm going ahead and optimizing this area a little bit. Because this is quite a smooth and not too much of a curved surface, I can get rid of a lot of these extra hedges. And those triangles aren't really a big deal in this area because it's firstly, they're very elongated, so they're not really going to be an issue at all. And also, this is a deforming part. Normally on an arm, especially this close to the elbow, you wouldn't really want triangles like that, but because this is hard surface and non deforming, I don't have to worry about stuff like that at all. I'm adding a few vertices to this rounded corner just to make it look a little bit more round. It definitely needs, you know, two more, at least to definitely not look jagged from a distance. Something like this should do. And I'm making sure to space them appropriately to sort of maximize the usage of that geometry. If you crowd them together too much, then you're also sort of wasting geometry because, you know, they're not covering as much distance as they could. And if you space them out too far, you're also just making them jag it again. I routed one of those additional edge loops through to that sort of vertical edge loop that runs upwards. If you look closely, you can see that there's a sort of plane change in the surface of the high poly there. So if you rotate your object around or your camera around, you can see that there's a sort of very definite line where the highlight stops. And generally in areas like that, it's good to have maybe an extra, you know, at the very least have an edge loop following that plane transition line to sort of reinforce it on the low poly. Now, if it's very subtle, then of course, it can be baked down into the normal map, and the normal map should sort of get it across just fine. But since I do have the polygon budget here and also, you know, my polyge sort of following that plane change already, there's no reason not to add to it, I find. But yeah, this is another reason why having your material setup in three DS Max in order to let you see the highlights properly is really useful. That's why you shouldn't really use, like a matte material when you're doing stuff like retopo or even modeling. You really want to get those highlights, and it's better if the highlights are also slightly soft because if you have like a very glossy material with harsh highlights, then you're also not having as much of that surface detail shown when you're looking at your objects in the viewport. So it's definitely a good idea to have a good viewpoint material setup that, you know, it shows off highlights, and it's also soft enough where you can very subtly see what's going on with those highlights and the shape of the geometry. So I'm editing this topology to sort of better fit with the surface of this object a little bit. You can see these two edges are really quite diagonal compared to the surface. So I'm going to try and edit them so or, you know, redo them so they're running more perpendicularly across the surface of the object. That's slightly better than what I had before. And I'm really just jumping around and just fixing whatever jumps out as an issue to me. So over here, the topology is also somewhat diagonal compared to the surface or at least lacking a little bit in that sense. So I'm, you know, adding a few more horizontal edge loops and then getting rid of some of the unnecessary vertical ones because it's a little bit too dense in the vertical direction. And I'm going to clean up this little mess down here of just, you know, a few vertices that are misplaced, basically. It seems like I've accidentally cut across this area with the cut tool at some point. These things happen, and, you know, it's probably happened so long ago that I can't just go and undo it, so I have to go through and clean up that topology. Over here as well, I'm sort of moving that edge along to make it a little bit more perpendicular to that actual curve. Yeah, that's generally what you want to avoid is sort of polygons that are going sort of diagonally compared to the surface. You basically want the polygons to go vertically and horizontally across the surface. Of course, when you have a lot of compound curves, there is no true horizontal and vertical. That's, you know, you sort of have to interpolate what the flow of the surface of the object really is. But the general rule of thumb is basically you want your edges to be going vertically and horizontally, and diagonal stuff is less desirable, but sometimes you do need to do you know, there are no hard rules, and, you know, every situation when it comes to topology is a bit of a compromise. So I'm going around and adjusting a lot of these edges that have sort of ended up a little bit diagonal compared to the surface that they're on. And also generally just optimizing things here and there a little bit. You can see there are excess edges in a lot of these places. So I'm looking at this corner, and I'm trying to make sure whether I need those two extra edges around the sides. So I got rid of them, and I'm spinning the camera around to take a look, and, you know, I decided that maybe I should keep them. You know, if I get rid of those two extra edges next to that main edge, you know, it sort of messes up the surrounding topology a little bit, so I'm going to keep those. Rounding off this corner a little bit more. That's definitely too pointy as it is now, so adding a few extra edges. This edge looked a little bit uneven to me, so, you know, I touch up a few vertices here and there, but I'm definitely going to have to come back and finish this sort of loop of edges that go around the top of the bottom half of the forearm a bit later. Moving on to this little detail that I noticed was unfinished. Now, when it comes to, like, a detail or an inset part that's in the middle of a bunch of other topology, and it's like, off center and diagonal to everything else around it, you know, there's really no good way to really integrate it into the surrounding topology. Now, you could make the surrounding topology flow around it. That's true. But there's really no reason to do that. I mean, again, if I do a test bake and for some reason, it comes out really poorly, like the normals are all messed up, then, you know, I'll probably have to go back and figure something out in that area. But generally, it is okay to just sort of cut a bunch of triangles around, like some sort of off center off kilter detail that's stuck in the middle of a flat area. That's a pretty normal way to do those sorts of things, and it's generally okay. If it's a really shiny object, then you might have to be a little bit more careful about making the flow around that object. But in this case, this whole forearm isn't going to be too glossy or metallic. Finishing up the topology around these little bolts as well. That also wasn't left finished. This is also easy just sort of triangulating to all of the nearby points, cutting in a bunch of triangles just to get rid of the angons. And I'm also taking this opportunity to clean up the curved part of this panel line. You can see it definitely didn't have enough topology here before. It was quite jagged looking. So going through and cleaning that up. Just, you know, cutting in a few extra edges to make it look round. And yeah, when it comes to the bolts, just the same as I did for that little inset detail up at the top, just, you know, cutting triangles to all of the nearest points in the surrounding topology, pretty much. In some cases, I'm just cutting right through up to that curved panel line because I need to add geometry to that curved panel line as well. So in that case, you know, it's two birds 1 stone. I can just cut straight upwards to that and add the edges I need there as well. Now, I noticed that some of these bolts have a different number of sides to the others. And generally, that's a little bit inconsistent. It's, you know, Well, it just leads to the question too as, you know, why does this belt have more sites than the other ones? What's special about it? And, you know, there's no good answer for it. The answer is, I wasn't counting when I made these details. So, you know, that's kind of like something you might want to avoid on your model. Generally, try and keep identical details like this, having a consistent amount of edges. So I'm going ahead and, you know, first I checked how many sites all of these have, and then I'm going ahead and making them more the same. Unfortunately, there's no real way to adjust the ones that are already done, so I pretty much have to just redo these details. Especially this one on the top right corner. Definitely had too few sides. So I've gone and redone it with an extra side like the other ones on the bottom. And you can see it doesn't take too long to redo stuff. So never be afraid to, you know, quickly redo a little detail like that if you find that it's a little bit off. Adding another edge to this curve. Now, the curve here is quite subtle, but the reason why I'm adding so many is because you can get this sort of wavy pattern on the normal map when you're baking curves or, you know, curved edges, just because the cage is, like, an inconsistent length away an inconsistent distance away from the hi poly when it goes around curved edges because cage is made up of straight lines and your hi poly, of course, isn't. And, you know, that's why baking rounded objects is a whole issue in and of itself. I will do a little demo of, you know, normal map issues and what causes them probably in the baking chapter. But for now, you know, that's just a little heads up on why I'm adding so many edges to the curves. I'm adding a bit of a shamfa around the edge of this inset detail as well. It'll make the loplet look a little bit nice you won't have that sort of harsh, weird looking edge when you look at it. And it also make baking a little bit easier because yeah, the thing is when you bake down a curved thing to a sharp corner, the normal map can actually make that look fairly convincing, but up close, it sort of falls apart a little bit, because, you know, the normal maps aren't all powerful. So because I can afford it because, you know, this is modern AA, so you can easily have 100,000 polygons for a character, it's nice to have these sorts of chamfs on details like this. And, you know, especially if you look at, first person weapon models, you will find, you know, basically chamfers on every single piece there. You know, apart from very small ones, maybe, generally, like a 90 degree angle is avoided. Here, sometimes, you know, I do have 90 degree angles on, maybe parts that are less important or whatever. But in noticeable areas like this, I am trying to add a little bit of a shamfa. Now, when I say ShamfA here, I am using the hamper modifier for the corners. Although I could just as easily just make a little cut there, as well. But when I say Sham f, you know, I don't have the Sham f tool or modifier in mind. What I just mean is, you know, having a sort of a second step as an edge. Instead of, like, a 90 degree angle, it's two edges, and they're both, you know, 45 degrees to the planes that go off of them, if that makes sense. You know, the uh, you know, I just have chamfer in mind as the, you know, physical definition of chamfer and not the specific tool here. That's why I'm using the edge, the Swift flip tool to add the chamfers in. You know, I'm not actually using the Shamfa tool for the hampers. So sorry if that is a confusing way to define it. When I mean when I say hamper, I generally just mean, like, you know, shaving the corner of and that's all for this bottom forearm. And in the next chapter, I will be moving on to the top half of the arm. There might be more time lapse footage and a little bit less commentary for the later chapters of this little fixing up of the arm meshes, because, you know, I've gone through a lot of the stuff here. It's fairly basic. It's just really cleanup of all the stuff I had done before. Just a lot of cutting and a lot of target welding mainly. So that's all for Chapter 33, and thanks for watching. Bye. 35. 34 Finishing The Mech Arm Retopo Part2 Timelapse: Welcome to Chapter 34. So in this chapter, I will be finishing all of the cleanup left on the mechanical arm, basically continuing on from where I left off in the last chapter. Now, in the last chapter, I already covered basically all the same stuff that I'm going to be doing here. Uh, I mean, this is going to be the exact same process just on the other arm. So I'm not really going to be introducing any new concepts or, you know, methods here. And honestly, I didn't really introduce much new in the last chapter, either. I mean, this is much of the same topology workflow that I've been using throughout the whole tutorial. So yeah, I don't think there's too much to comment on for this chapter. So this is just going to be a time lapse chapter. And I might have a few words at the end of this chapter, maybe going over really briefly over a few things that I've done throughout this chapter. But other than that, it's just going to be a time lapse, so please enjoy. H a no so I'm almost done with the retopo for the mechanical arm, and that means it's almost the end of this chapter as well. So I'll just say a few things to keep in mind when you're doing retopo for objects that are hard surface like this. I guess the first one I'll mention is when you have repetitive details like these little bolts and, you know, other details that are, you know, can be seen as a sort of separate object. You just place around on your mesh, so like bolts or little panels or whatever sort of repetitive detail like that you might have. Make sure that you're using instances and not unique copies of those meshes, because if you use instances, you'll only have to unwrap them once. If you make them unique, then you'll have to unwrap each one uniquely. So yeah, definitely make sure you're using instances for any kind of mesh that might be repeating itself throughout the model. I guess, another thing to keep in mind, when you're working on hard surface assets, you can optimize them aggressively in areas that are flat. Along curved surfaces, of course, you need to have as much topology as you need to define those curves. But on flat surfaces, you can, you know, triangulate and merge things down almost as much as you need, but you should still avoid very thin, long triangles. When you're optimizing, always optimized for the sort of smallest length of triangle you can. You roughly want all the sides to be the same length. Of course, they can be a little bit more elongated than that, but definitely avoid triangles that almost look like a line and stuff like that. I guess the most important thing to keep an eye out for with hard surface assets is the edges. You definitely want those to be nice, crisp, and smooth and quite even. If your edges are uneven, a very common issue with hard surface baking is to get a sort of wavy pattern along curved edges that are baked down. And that's why you want to take extra care and always add a little bit of extra geometry to make curved surfaces or curved edges extra round, just to avoid that sort of baking issue. And I guess when it comes to merging, your hard surface objects together, you don't really need to merge everything down. You definitely shouldn't be merging together parts that move independently of each other. So, you know, keep any sort of moving components separate. As for other stuff, you know, if it's easy, if it's just like a thin scene between things, then obviously merge them down. That'll make things easier later on. If maybe you've got a lot of hollow parts or there's a large gap between them, then it's a little bit tricky, and you have to decide case by case what you're going to do. But that applies generally to all sorts of, you know, topology, not just hard surface. And it's something I've covered quite a bit in other parts of the tutorial as well, like that fabric square down there. The same principle I used for the loose hanging fabric square can be applied to hard surface acids, as well as long as the seam is covered up. If the seam isn't covered up, it gets very tricky to hide that. And so that's only something you can do if there's something covering seams like that. Okay, I think that's about all I want to say here, and that'll be the end of Chapter 34. So thanks for watching. 36. 35 Finishing The Neck Retopo: Welcome to Chapter 35. So in this chapter, I'm going to be finishing up the neck piece hood thing. I have the base topology already done in previous chapters and same for the hood. But what I need to do is figure out how I'm going to connect it to the torso and also how I'm going to connect it to the hood. Because, you know, there's a little gap between the neck piece and the torso. I mean, the gap is not even that little. It's quite significant, so I have to decide whether I'm going to weld it to the rest of the torso and then, you know, have to model in a little pocket between this hood and the torso, especially in areas where it's sitting further above the surface. Or if I'm going to keep this neck piece as a separate mesh, and then I'll have to model a little bit of the underside of it, at least, and a little bit more of the torso as well, so there's no holes between the neck and the torso. Both of these options work fine. It is somewhat a matter of the exact application of your character. If it's a modular character, then you might you'll probably want to have them separate. Uh, if it's a one off character, maybe you will want to weld them together. If the materials between two parts are very different, you'll probably want to have them separate, and so on. There's a lot of reasons I haven't quite decided yet. As for combining the hood and the neck piece, I think this is a little bit more straightforward. Of course, the hood is stitched to the rest of this neck piece, so already, that means that I'm going to have to connect it to the rest of the neck piece by default. The bigger question is, you know, how do I handle all of the bunched up parts of the hood on the inside, and, you know, where do I choose to connect it up? Because I sort of have to you know, not treat it as a piece of fabric, but sort of treat it more like a lump and only really capture the details and not model in the actual shape of the cloth, how it's twisting around because firstly, that would be really hard to do in the topo. And secondly, you know, there's no real reason to do that. So what I'm doing now is cutting the outline of where the hood gets really close to the neck piece into the surface of the neck piece, and, you know, that's more or less where I'm going to be welding it to the neckpiece Where the hood gets further away from the whole neck thing, that's where it gets a little bit trickier. I'm having to move down a bit here to where these hood pieces are closer to the neck. Um, I'm not going to be deleting any faces there just yet. I still want to take a look and clean up some things before I actually tackle attaching these parts to each other. I'm going to get some of these parts out of the way so I can see what I'm doing better. I also need to not forget that there's that little scarf that goes in between the hood and the neck here. So there are a few things I have to juggle here, especially if you see the part of the neck piece that goes under the hood, I have to sort of decide, you know, how I'm going to connect it to the torso and also how I'm going to connect the hood to the neck. So where I left for the hood piece is, you know, I just left an open edge on the bottom here. So I'm extending that open edge outwards a little bit here. I also need to get rid of these shoes because they're getting in the way. So extending the bottom edge of the hood piece down a little bit here, and then from there, I'm probably going to want to bridge across from the hood piece across to the neck or the collar, I guess. It's a collar, I think. So, you know, that whole hole or cavity that's in there, I'm probably just going to bridge across it. Directly into the hood. Of course, I'm going to have to go inward a little bit, follow at least the start of that shape, where there's this sort of little hole or cavity. But I'm not going to model the full depth of it or all of the folds that go on inside it, because that's not really a visible area. There's also going to be a scarf in the way blocking my view of that area. So there's no reason to go into detail modeling that part. I just need to, you know, get a little hole going that, you know, will look right from most angles. And, you know, as soon as what I'm modeling is sort of outside the normal viewing range, I'll just bridge across to the hood. And so you can see how I'm, you know, having to decide not to follow the exact shape of the high poly here and instead, you know, figure out a sort of more suitable shape for the low poly. Like, these deep cavities that are formed from the cloth simulation of the hood definitely aren't necessary in the low poly. So I'm choosing to sort of make them more shallow, and, you know, this makes it easier, firstly for me to retopo and UV and bake and it saves texture space and, you know, work in general and polygons. It's just a good practice not to have, like, big, useless holes that reach inwards, especially, you know, they can cause clipping issues and all sorts of problems. So yeah, if you have areas like that underneath the hood, where, you know, you have this sort of big deep hole, but no one's ever going to see into it, it's basically not visible. You do need to, you know, either avoid them from the get go when you're doing the high poly or, you know, sort of get rid of them in your low poly when you're doing your topology. So now I'm getting around to deleting the underlying faces underneath the hood. You can see that I guess a little bit of my work earlier when doing the re topo is wasted here because I'm deleting these faces that I re topologized earlier. They're not going to be used really because they're underneath the hood and I'm welding the hood to the collar. So make sure you think about those sorts of things before you, you know, don't spend a lot of effort doing a full blown topo on parts that you might have to delete later. Always take that into account. Now, in this case, I did a pretty quick job on the back of the hood because I did know that this part was going to be underneath the hood, and it might get deleted or it might just not be visible in the final product anyway. So now I can start bridging across to the hood between these two objects. I've attached them to each other. And the reason I'm bridging is because there is a little gap between the hood and the collar and, you know, I do need to sort of represent that a little bit in the low poly. Otherwise, it will be really apparent that these parts are sort of merged to each other and a little bit more blob like and not look as clean and separate to each other. I do need to model in this sharp little gap between the hood and the collar in order to get these parts to really look separate, even though they aren't. I need to hide the area where they attach to each other. That means putting it a little bit deeper down in this small gap between the hood and the collar. For now, I'm just bridging across and later on I will have to go in and move the vertices around a little bit between these two parts. So you can see there's a lot of complex shapes going on here. Luckily, there is not a tremendous amount of deformation in this area. It doesn't cover the shoulders, which is good because if it covered the shoulders and that would be pretty complex and I'd have to put more fort into litpology and the neck area, you know, while there is some twisting of the neck, it's generally not very extreme. It's quite um you know, it's a little bit uniform, more uniform as opposed to something like an elbow or a knee, where you just basically got a part pivoting up to 90 degrees or more. In those cases, you know, defamation is very extreme around the neck. It's not too bad. So you can see the tology is a little bit crazy where the hood is because I've got all these folds and this fabric jumbling onto itself. But it's not really going to be a problem. Because it's not going to have a huge amount of defamation in that area. But I do still need to have a good topology in order to, you know, have the silhouette read nicely, because that's another thing topology affects. You know, if you have mad topo, you know, your silhouette will be a little bit messed up. So I still have to follow a lot of the general rules, even if this area isn't particularly deforming. You can see that I'm adding extra edge loops to the hood wherever I need them in order to have the same amount of edge loops on the collar and the hood, just to make it easier to attach these parts together. And have a neater flow of the topology. And here where it gets a little bit deeper down, it's, you know, the topology is less even, and it's a little bit harder to achieve that, you know, continuous edge though from the hood up to the collar without just adding in a few triangles down here. And this isn't a visible area, so that's not too much of an issue down here. I can easily just use triangles in that area without too much bother. Now, coming back to the underside of the hood here, I'm going to start by ridging up this gap somewhat. And also, because I previously deleted the back side of the hood here, I'm going to bring a few of those edges back, and that will help me know where to bridge to. So now I just have to fill in what's left of this hole, and once the hole is filled in, I can go ahead and, you know, add a few more edges to sort of define that shape a little bit more. But since I've roughly got that part done, I'm going to move over and try and finish a few of the other areas that are still lacking a lot of attention. So the bottom side of the hood still needs welding in. And also the tips of the hood aren't quite finished, either, so I'm going to have to approach those as well. This is quite similar to what I did on the top side of the hood, so just bridging across this little gap here, and that's about all I need to do. Now, where there is less of a gap, I might start welding directly and not using bridge anymore. So it's dependent on what the high poly really looks like. Again, I don't want to add too many edges and make things too dense. I do want to keep this somewhat consistent with everything I've done for the rest of the character after all. And that's what makes this area a little bit tricky. Just so many different pieces and angles coming together and having to figure out sort of how to generalize it all instead of, you know, following the actual forms of these cloth folds. I'm having to sort of turn them into a blob that correctly captures their shape and sort of in some places crossover from between different layers of cloth. So that makes a little bit tricky. But yeah, this is pretty much how you approach big bundles of cloth. So, stuff like a bunched up hood or, you know, maybe, like, a big thick wrapping of cloth around an arm or something like bandages. You typically won't go in and model all of the layers of bandage into your low poly. You'll sort of generalize that area. And stuff like that. Also makes using tiling textures in those areas a little bit easier. So if you're doing details that you can't really, you know, you have to sort of generalize when you're doing your retpper and you can't have a nice sort of tiling a nice UV tailored for tiling, like here. The reason why I say these EVs won't really work well for timing is because there's a lot of parts. You know, it's not following the low poly isn't following the surface of the high poly continuously. Essentially. That will make more sense when I get to the UVs. I'll definitely explain this. But right now while I'm doing the re topper, I want to sort of add that if you are working on an area and you know that it won't be possible to re topologize in a way that will allow for tiling textures. I mean this in particular for fabrics where tiing textures are quite important these days. You want to be able to have a sort of tiling texture for the actual cloth weave or pattern for at least a normal map, and, you know, sometimes the albedo. So if you are working on a part that won't allow for tiling textures because of, you know, how it's crumpled up or shaped, you might want to consider applying a height map to it in your high poly so you can bake down all of that, cloth texture detail, you know, cloth weave detail right into the normal, normal map, the regular base normal map instead of relying on a tiling texture to do it. Or relying on tiling textures in substance paint to do it because they simply won't apply very well. Of course, sometimes you can use tiling textures, even in cases like that. It's just sort of a little bit of trickery. Like, from a distance, it will look okay. It's just when you zoom in that you'll notice that the tiling texture of the weave of the cloth isn't quite actually following the folds of the cloth. When you zoom in, you'll see that, you know, that pattern is sort of crossing over from one layer of fabric to the other in a way that it wouldn't in real life. But from a distance, it still looks fine. So tilings extras are still used even in cases like this. You know, it's sort of a bit of a compromise. And, you know, it's still perfectly fine to use them. You just have to be aware of that that, you know, it might not hold up so well up close. And if you maybe want it to hold up very well up close, you have the option of baking that detail into your just regular normal map, your base normal map instead of using a tiling texture. And the way you would do that is you put that detail into your high poly, so it bakes down. Now, with these corners as well, because they're quite rounded and quite small, and you've got a little bit of extra detail that you've got like the top or the internal section of the herd coming in with the tip of the herd. It's a little bit more of a complex area. So I'm just adding more triangles to integrate it into the more flat and, you know, uniform collar area which needs less topology in order to, you know, get its surface across. So as usual, on the low poly, just using triangles like this is pretty much fine in an area like this. So nothing to worry about here. It's not really too complicated of an area to figure out. Really, it just depends on adding a little bit of extra geometry to support that little, you know, curve and that other detail that's coming in here. And I need to make sure that, you know, everything is in the right place here. I've got my edge loops aligned to the right landmarks on the geometry. So like, you know, I don't have edge loops that sort of go diagonally across at, like, end of the hood, for example. It's better if edge loops just follow that across the hallway. So, you know, if at the start of this hood piece, you see that in the corner, the edge loop is placed on the bottom third of that sort of rounded seam of the hood, then it should stay there throughout the whole rest of the hood, on the bottom third of that detail. It's not ideal to have edge lips spiraling across that sort of feature on the high poly. So yeah, try and keep edge lips sort of consistent across a detail and not traveling diagonally across it because that can sort of look bad on the low poly sometimes. Of course, the higher poly you go, the more these problems are sort of alleviated just by the sheer brute force extra topology you have. But it's still definitely, good to practice these, like, you know, good standards in your modeling. It doesn't really take any extra time to do it properly if you know what you're doing. And, you know, it still does look a little bit better in the low poly, even if it's more subtle now than if you were limited to only like 30,000 polygons. In which case, you know, everything you do is more severe and noticeable. Now on a higher polymodel, you can get away with a little bit more. But if you're constantly getting away with stuff, then, you know, in a portfolio piece, that makes you look unprofessional and, like, you don't know what you're doing, because chances are if you are, you know, doing stuff like that, not lining up your edge flow with details and sort of having them travel inconsistently across a detail, then, you know, chances are maybe you don't know what you're doing. At least that's how it will look to, you know, recruiters or whoever you've sent your portfolio to. So yeah, try and keep these things consistent. Now I'm adding a little bit more detail to the front section of the sod, adding a few extra vertices around the corners here because if you look closely, they are a little bit rounded and if I just left them harsh, then they wouldn't big down very well at all, and there's a little fold going across the front as well. But in general, that area is quite flat, so I don't need a huge amount of topology. I'm adding in the indentation or I mean, I guess it's more like a fabric seam that goes around the front here. As well, I mean, this part is maybe not as essential to the form, but because that's a little step there, if you remember from especially when I was re topoing the torso, I sort of said it is good to have an outlining loop of edges around any sort of steep step in geometry to sort of have better vertex normals, which will improve your normal maps slightly. So that's, you know, it's a sort of two and one reason why I added that edge loop around the front there. Maybe if that indentation was just there by itself, I probably wouldn't add that extra edge loop around it, but combined with the fact that it will improve the way that area bakes by, you know, having more gradual vertex normals, that sort of warrants gives me a good enough reason to add that loop that goes around the front. You know, the little seam that goes around this little front panel. Now, that little front panel in itself is a little bit of an issue just because on the high poly, it's not exactly visible now, but on the high poly, it is just a single sided mesh, and, you know, I have to decide whether I'm going to make this part single sided as well, or if I'm going to add a little bit of thickness to it. Now, I probably will add thickness to it. And the reason being is if I want to have it single sided, then I'll have to apply a different material with a two sided shader on it. And making a whole material just for this tiny section doesn't really make sense. So it would be a lot smarter if I just gave a little bit of volume to this section. Even though it isn't know, entirely necessary, this is such a thin piece of fabric that I don't really need to give it volume. But just to avoid having to assign a separate material to it or having to assign a double sided material to this entire mesh, it makes sense to give it a little bit of thickness. And I'm probably going to have to go in and shell the hi poly as well, in that case, in order to get it to bake down properly. Now, there is a little trick you can do. You can just duplicate those faces and then invert their normals, and that's a way to sort of achieve two sided faces through geometry. But in this case, I think adding that even tiny bit of thickness might actually look nice, especially because it's right up close to the face. So, you know, it might help in renders a little bit to have that tiny bit of thickness instead of just an impossibly fin plane in that area. There's a little indent here as well on the hi poly, so I'm adding an extra loop to add that indent into the silhouette. Again, little details like that, being modeled into low poly is really just more of a recent luxury that, you know, higher polycunts have allowed. But if you can, you should definitely include little stuff like that. But you still do, you know, you always need to be maintaining that balance of not adding, you know, not making things way too dense and really deciding which, you know, subtle forms need to be added into the low poly and which don't. It is a balancing act, and, you know, I don't think there's an easy guide I can give you on exactly when you should decide to add, you know, something into loboli and when you shouldn't, you know, it's somewhat subjective and also every situation is just so different. Like even these sort of very subtle folds, you know, probably not essential to add into the low poly, um, the ones I just did before, this one is a little bit more significant. So I definitely want to add this one in where you can see the sort of collar crimps and on itself, that definitely needed those extra few loops. This area as well, sort of bunch it up a little bit, so I want to add those. And that's the thing. These would look fine if you just left them flat and didn't model them in, but they look a tiny bit better if you do go ahead and add them to the low poly. I don't think it would be considered a mistake if you sort of skipped modeling them in, but it definitely adds a little extra bit of A flare, I think. And again, you need to remember that this part is quite close to the face. So I'm going to be doing at least a few close operandis of this area because you always want to do some close operandis of the face. You know, unless it's, you know, a character specifically for something like a top down game or something like that where maybe they're still quite low detail and there's never any real focus on the face. Um, you know, like a game like Elden ring. Although from software, the developers, they are somewhat behind or, you know, the graphical quality of their games isn't really quite up there with other AA games. But they don't put any focus on their faces at all. Even though the actual character models do look really great. They often just use an game character editor, the same one you use when you start the game for most of their NBC faces. So, if you were working on something like that, you wouldn't be doing close operandis of the face, in that case, because there's very little emphasis on the faces in those games. And so if you have a personal project that sort of maybe, you know, has that in mind, maybe you're making some sort of diablo fan project. Or another similar game where maybe there's not so much emphasis on the player model's face, you would avoid making renders like that. But in this case, I definitely do want to make renders off the face. So I also want to make this part hold up when compared, you know, when it's right up close to the camera. So that's why I'm adding this extra attention to edges like this. And again, adding that additional edge hoop that goes around this one just to have slightly smoother vertex normals. Like I've mentioned several times now, if you can't afford it, it's nice to have sort of supporting loop that goes near any very harsh edge on the low poly. It helps a little bit with normal maps, especially in areas where you aren't splitting or putting a hard edge between islands, and you typically don't put hard edges anywhere on more organic and softer objects. Now I do move this loop down a tiny bit just because especially around the back, that sort of seam disappears and the hypoly becomes a lot less prominent. And I feel like that loop could be doing more work. I I moved it a little bit down to sort of assist with getting the curvature of the back across because if I left it up high, you know, it's just in a flat area. It's not doing too much around the front. You know, it's maybe a little bit closer to the top is better because there is that little detail up there. Now returning to this little corner of the hoodie, I'm just taking a look at it and seeing if there's anything really wrong with the triangulation or the way I've modeled this in, if anything looks strange and isn't quite following the underlying shapes. Now, I want to move the sort of vertice that is at the point where, you know, the collar joins the hood down a little bit, like I said earlier, to make these objects really look like they're separate from each other and not like they're, you know, merged together. And, you know, if you hide the point where these objects join together in that little gap between the hood and the neck, then, you know, the viewer really can't tell that they're connected to each other, which is exactly what I want. Now, I'm going to go ahead and move some of these vertices up to the bottom of the collar piece. I'm still not 100% sure if I'm going to merge this with the rest of the torso or not. Right now, I'm just focusing on finishing the whole neck piece in general, and then I'll think about the actual collar piece. You can see how especially from this angle, the sort of overhang of geometry there really makes the hood look like a separate piece. So that's working as intended. That's quite nice. Right here, I just noticed a little edge missing on the low poly of the torso. So I just went ahead and decided to fix that before I forgot. So, yeah, side tracking a tiny bit here. But, you know, I thought it might be a good idea to fix that issue before I forget about it and, you know, forget to fix it entirely. So what I end up doing here next is I attach the whole neck piece and that whole part to the rest of the torso. And this is one of the ways you can do this, you know, and it might be something that works better on other characters. But after I did this, I ended up deciding that it would be better to have these parts separate. Now, again, I will reiterate that a lot of the time, merging two parts is absolutely fine. You know, it really depends on the circumstances and the exact character and the exact type of part, where what works better. In this case, although it looked okay, it was pretty possible, I decided that it might be better to have those parts separate in the end because, well, firstly, I want to show you guys, the absolute best way to make this character. And while you know, merging these two parts may be acceptable, and if I was making a portfolio piece for myself, I probably would have left it that way, if I am honest. But, you know, here, I want to show you what the best exact approach, in my opinion, would have been. So, you know, later on, I do go back and detach these parts and make them separate. So in order to not waste your time, if you don't want to watch me attaching these two parts together, which, you know, all that work eventually gets discarded and it isn't a part of the final asset or character, you know, I'm going to separate all of this stuff of me attaching these two parts into their own chapter, and it's going to be a time lapse. So if you are interested on how to attach two parts together like this, you know, for a character or an asset, you can go ahead and check out that time lapse chapter. But if you don't want to spend the odd half hour watching that, which, you know, it will not be used in the final character. You can just go and skip ahead to Chapter 37. So just quickly make that clear again. If you want to watch me merge these two parts together, which won't be used in the final character, carry on to Chapter 36. If you just want to carry on with work on the character and skip that, go to Chapter 37. And that will be all for this chapter, then. And, yeah, I will see you guys in the next one, whether it's 36 or 37, you guys can decide. 37. 36 Merging The Neck And The Torso (Optional) Timelapse: Come to Chapter 36. Now, this is an optional chapter. Like I explained in the end of the last chapter, everything I end up doing in this chapter gets scrapped. I reconsider and redo this whole part. What I do in this chapter is I merge the neck piece and the rest of the torso. And the reason why I'm leaving this in as a bonus chapter is because this isn't a wrong way to do this. This is a perfectly valid way to connect parts together, and, you know, you can freely do this on, you know, even this character or other characters. This isn't really wrong or anything. I just thought that it might be better if these parts are separate. So it's really dependent on your specific situation, the specific character you have, the types of shapes, the types of gaps between parts you have on whether this method works or not. In this case, it does work, but I felt like having them separate would work a little bit better. So that's one reason why I kept this in. The other reason is just to maintain continuity between chapters. Um, you know, I didn't want to cut this, and then some of you guys would be confused as to why, for some reason, all of these parts are merged together when I didn't show why I did that and why I'm later on disconnecting them and redoing stuff that I didn't even show that I did. So yeah, the other reason why this is here is just so you can see the whole process and so there's no weird stuff going on where suddenly a bunch of work has been done and you haven't seen it. That said, you can freely decide to skip this part. None of the stuff in this chapter will be used in the final assets, feel free to skip ahead to the next one if this doesn't interest you. If you are interested in seeing me merge these parts together, feel free to watch. There's nothing really new introduced here. So there's nothing for me to comment on. I'm literally just welding these two elements together, basically, and filling in a few gaps like this. So I don't think this chapter is all that interesting. Uh, I just told you why I've kept it in, and that'll be all for this introduction. There won't be any commentary in this chapter. It'll just be a time lapse. And if you don't find this interesting, head on over to Chapter 37 and skip this one. That'll be all that I have to say here. You know, if you do want to watch this chapter, please enjoy. 38. 37 Finishing The Retopo: Welcome to Chapter 37. We are coming up to the last few chapters of topology, and we are very, very close to being done now. So there's just a little bit more polishing in terms of actual re topo work left to do. All of the parts are basically finished. There's just, you know, maybe a few more edges to add or a few vertices to move around in that sense. And then the other thing I need to do is go ahead and make sure everything fits together nicely. There's a few areas where I still need to sort of bring some parts together. And I also need to check, you know, if there are no gaps between parts and in general, you know, look at how these separate parts are going to fit together on the final model. So that's going to be the main topic of these chapters, just really going ahead and finalizing the low polynw. So like I said, in Chapter 35 and 36, I didn't like how the neckpiece merged with the torso ended up looking. I thought it wasn't the best way to approach this whole thing, and it would be better to have these parts separate. So the first thing I start with, you know, once I've taken a good look at how it looks when I've merged the hood and the torso together and, you know, evaluated if maybe it might be better if these parts are separate, I gave it a good thing. And, you know, once I decided that, yeah, I should probably try and separate them and see if that's any better, I'm going ahead and selecting all of the bordering edges, you know, all of the edges that make up the edge of the original hood piece. And now I'm selecting the rest of them, so I can go ahead and detach the entire hood from the torso again. So I'm going ahead and making my selection, just using the Lasso tool to select everything upwards from the initial pass that I selected. Another maybe quicker way to do this would have been possibly to detach the initial loop of bordering faces I selected, and then I could select the top part of the hood as an element and then reattach that little bordering loop of faces with the hood. Now you've noticed that all my selected faces, sometimes I have them as just the edge is highlighted. Other times the whole face gets highlighted red. I believe the shortcut to toggle between the different highlighting modes is F two. It should have been shown to you guys in the bottom left corner. So I'm back to where I was before with these two parts detached. So what I need to do if I'm going to have all these parts as separate pieces is I need to build up the torso a little bit, so all of the missing parts, basically. And I can go ahead and make this a little bit more low poly and not really worry about all the panel lines and internal details too much because this is going to be basically hidden all the time. I really just want this to, you know, as a volume to fill up any gaps when I'm looking at the model. And the same goes for the bottom of the hood. It's just going to be really simple, really reduced in poly count. And, you know, it's just there to be a volume and sort of block any gaps so the environment doesn't poke through your character when you're looking at. So that's basically what I'm doing here. I'm sort of making a start on extending the torso upwards. Now, this lower area where, you know, the torso and the hood just meets up is still quite visible. These parts definitely might be, you know, poking through, depending on, you know, how far away the hood is from these parts, you know, along the character, you know, the gap varies in distance. And also in general, you know, these parts might be visible. So here I am paying a little bit more attention, similar to the rest of the torso. It's just going to be higher up where I start to lower the polycunt and ignore maybe some of the surface details and by ignore, I mean, ignore them as in not modeling them into the low poly and just leaving them to bake down into the normal map. So it's just the lower part of, you know, this area where I'm going to pay more attention for modeling. So I'm just using the extend tool to extend all of my existing loops upwards. That's a pretty sensible way to do this, I think, because I already have all my polyloop density I need. I can just extend upwards, and, you know, there's nothing really complicated I do I have to do for this torso topology, especially because it is going to be hidden. So you can see that I am still lining up my edge loops with a lot of the larger features on the body. Part of that is out of habit. And another reason is I do have to put these edge loops somewhere. I can't just, you know, I still need to roughly model the volume in. And for that, I need to have these edge loops. And, you know, if I'm going to put them somewhere, I may as well put them roughly where they make sense on the body. And, you know, another thing it's just out of habit. This is the typical place where you would put these d troops, and, you know, that's where I automatically decide to put them. So, um, Yeah, because this part isn't going to be visible, it won't be visible in your renders. It won't be visible in your wireframes. You can really do whatever you like here. Unless you intend to show it, maybe you want to do a render without the scarf on for some reason. Like, you could try and make this character modular if you wanted to. I'm not going to be doing that. But, um, yeah. Four areas that aren't completely invisible. I mean, it might not be like the most professional thing in the world. But if a part is never going to be visible in a single one of your screenshots, and you know that for sure, you can afford to be a little bit lazy and rush things a little bit in those areas because no one will ever know. So, yeah, I guess you don't have to be as neat as me in this upper torso area, this part is definitely going to be under the scarf. So you can afford to be a little bit rough. That is, you know, as long as these areas won't be visible to anyone in renders or, you know, anything else. And taking shortcuts like that is absolutely fine, because, you know, we all only have a finite amount of time, and if you are going to be spending your time on parts that no one is going to see ever know about, then, well, unless you are practicing and learning things, then it's worth it. But if it's something you already know by heart or if it's, you know, you're not really learning anything by doing it, then, you know, feel free to take a little bit of a shortcut and, you know, make an area a little bit more rough compared to everything else if you know for sure that it's not going to be visible. So, yeah, I'm spending a few minutes getting this, you know, top of the torso done. I'm looking around to see how much of the top of the torso I actually need to model in um, because I don't need all of it, right? I could, although you could easily just, you know, carry on modeling and cap the whole top of the torso, that wouldn't be an issue, and that's pretty often what is done, you know, especially in the studio, sometimes you don't always know what some of the accessories are going to end up like, or if it's a modul character or even on a personal project, maybe you don't know, and you feel like you might make some adjustments to the shape of this neck piece. And if you already think you're pretty much finished with the torso and you're not going to change it anymore, you may as well just model in the whole top of it, and that way you won't have to go back and change anything if there are any other changes to any parts that, you know, are meant to cover up that area. So, you know, feel free to go in and cap off the entire top of thero. In this case, I am going to skip that a little bit and only try and create a low poly for the areas that will be visible, along with a little bit of extra thrown on to just be doubly sure that those parts aren't visible. So basically, I will do a little bit around the shoulders and go a little bit above where the neck piece typically ends, and that'll be enough. So more or less to wear that sort of hard surface part that goes around the neck area, you can see ends. This is how much I'm going to retper and that should be enough to sort of work and hide everything that or, you know, fill in any gaps that show up. Now, as it gets higher up on the torso here and these areas are less visible, I can reduce the polycw quite significantly because I don't have to worry about, you know, the polygons being visible or, you know, visible jaggedness from a lower polycunt. And, you know, that's because at best, if you do end up seeing that area, it's just going to be a tiny saliver and no polygon edges will actually be identifiable, so I can go ahead and reduce the polygon quite a lot up there. You can see I've already done that in one area. I've merged a lot of these vertices together and essentially halved the polycunt in that one area, and I will do this a little bit more as I finish a few of these other areas as well. So I'm just going to carry on doing the re topo up here. Again, you know, sort of be reasonable with what you're doing. You don't have to really try and reduce the polycon in these hidden areas too much because these days, I've said before a few times as well. We do have fairly large polygon budgets, and saving, you know, 100 triangles really doesn't mean much on the scale of a whole character. That is, it can be well over 100,000 triangles. So, you know, there's no reason to spend a lot of time trying to reduce a parts significantly. Be efficient, you know, be reasonable. Don't spend 10,000 polygons in an area that isn't visible, but also don't spend, you know, hours on an area trying to save, you know, 100 or 50 polygons as well. I do want to make sure that any of this new topology I'm making lines up with the edge loops of the arms and shoulders, because if the topology lines up, generally, you know, when it deforms, you won't get any sort of edges that are sort of moving through each other, if that makes sense. What I mean is, if your vertices are sort of not very aligned between two separate parts, then even if the skinning matches quite well, those vertices are still sort of in slightly different positions, and they will sort of slide against each other. And what can happen is little borders start to noticeably move around. That's something that's not very desirable, of course. So, you know, whenever you have two parts lining up with each other, you always want to try and align all of the vertices to each other. Now, in other places, it can be less important. And it can be less of an issue, but around this shoulder area, especially, it's quite a complex area. And yeah, the best practice here would be to have, you know, where there's a vertice for the end of the shoulder, there should be also a vertice. You know, there is similar location on the torso where it links up. You definitely want these two parts to be more or less lined up. Here I have extruded or extended a loop over the shoulder because you can see there's obviously a pretty significant gap here, and it definitely needs to be filled in, and I'm going to have to add that topology to the shoulder. And I just decided to do it here on the torso while I could, and then later on, I can detach those faces and attach them to the shoulder as needed. But you can only see that there is a gap that's going to need filling in over there, definitely. So yeah, I'm detaching those faces I made and attaching them to the arm. I could have just gone into the arm object and extruded them from the arm as well just as easily. It's just, you know, sometimes you end up doing things the other way around. Now, back to the torso. I'm going to line up all of these vertices with the actual thickness of the torso cloth. So I'm just going to go ahead with the drag tool and line them up. I want the, you know, make sure that these edges aren't going diagonally across the edge of the surface. You generally want them perpendicular. So, you know, don't make them sort of diagonal if you can. It doesn't have to be super precise. You can just eyeball it, but, yeah, there should be as straight as possible along the height of whatever cloth object you have. Now what I'm going to do is fill in the whole of this whole sleeve or shoulder area on the torso. So the way I'm going to do that is bridge across the top. And what that will let me do is fill in the remaining hole just using the capital. Under the whole selection mode. And what I could do now is just use the cut tool to cut in the exact polygon, the exact quads I want inside this area. But instead, I'm going to use the inset tool, and that gives me the exact sort of topology I need in order to, you know, use the drag tool to align a lot of these vertices to the inside of the sleeve, and that gives me sort of a little bit of depth and thickness of this whole cloth setup. And it sort of makes it look like a three D piece of cloth. If I have this little edge here where it's, you know, standing up above the surface. And I need this because there is a little bit of a gap between the arm and the sleeve. Just like with all cloth, it's not always, you know, going to be skin tight, sort of hangs above the skin, and it only really touches the skin in, you know, contact points where the weight is resting on the body. So it is nice to have this sort of thickness, and you can see here that it really makes it look like this cloth is, you know, a piece of cloth with thickness, not just some weird capped off hole. So I'm going to continue lining up all these vertices on the inner side of this piece of cloth. It is a little bit troublesome in some areas because you just can't see some of them with the camera, or the drag tool doesn't have a line of sight to an area, because the drag tool sort of depends on the camera direction to the surface a little bit. So, for example, I can't use it to snap to the backside of a face. I have to be looking at a face in order to be able to snap to it with the drag tool. So once I have that deloup set up, I can pretty safely just collapse all of the internal faces down, and that will be how I feel in this hole. In some cases where you have a sort of cap like this that is more visible and you can see more of it, you might want to instead of collapsing everything down to one point, bridge across and sort of have more quads in the way you collapse things down because sometimes very triangulated method like this can sort of have a few visual artifacts to it. In this case, only the very outer edge is visible, and this is typically the area with the least issues, so I'm not going to bother doing anything else. Of course, if an issue does come up once I bake it and take a look in our render scene in marmoset, then I will go back and have to fix this. But in an area like this, collapsing everything down to a single point definitely shouldn't be an issue. Now, I'm doing the same for the top part of the cloth as well, because this area is a little bit visible underneath the neckpiece. It does poke out a tiny bit. So I do need to model some of this area in to make sure that I don't have a gap above the shoulder. So there are sort of two layers in the high poly in this area, so I need to spend a little bit of time sort of modeling in the transition area where that second sort of hard surface piece sits on this cloth piece. You can see that this cloth piece is sort of sandwiched between an underlying layer and then a layer on top. So I do have to spend a little bit of time figuring out how to model that into the low poly areas like this where there are two parts coming together at a sort of angle. At a gradual angle or parts sandwiched between each other are always, you know, something you have to think about when you're doing the low poly, especially if you want it to look nice and neat and organized or if it's in an area where you don't want to spend a whole lot of topology, a whole lot of triangles because it's less important area like this area, which is underneath, you know, the shoulder, and it's also quite deep in there. Definitely not very visible. So I don't want to have a lot of triangles in this area, but I also do need to make sure that it bakes well and is more fairly presentable and not completely phoned in because it still might be visible, especially if maybe I have the arms up or in some sort of pose. I could definitely show up. I definitely don't want it to look very janky. It's not too complex. Again, it's just something you have to make sure you do properly and don't make it stand out, you know. The main thing with these areas is you don't want them to really stand out because if someone sees that there's something wrong going on there, then, you know, you've messed up. I don't really feel the need to model in the sort of panel line or the seam between these two parts. Maybe if this was on the front of the torso in a really visible area, then I would, but because this isn't basically it's at the very least going to be under, like, a pretty deep shadow, and it's definitely not very visible. So I don't feel the need to model in that panel line sort of between those two parts that get sandwiched together. So what I'm going to do next is finish up the underside of this neck piece. And the reason why I'm doing that now is because I need to check for gaps between the torso and the neck piece. So, you know, in order to be able to check for gaps, I need to sort of fill in the big hole underneath the neckpiece because otherwise, you know, I won't be able to tell what is, you know, getting covered up or not if this part isn't finished. So the first thing I want to do is clean up the bottom edge here, because, you know, I need to do that before I start filling in the hole underside, because, you know, if I fill in the hole underneath, then it's going to be a little bit more work to fix up this edge just because they don't have to be using the cut tool and, you know, cutting between all the to sees underneath. Whereas instead, if I do this now, I can just fill in the entire hole underneath and just use an inset pretty much to clean it up, and it won't be too much manual work. Also, I've got a few lingering faces here that are leftover from when it was still attached to the torso, and, you know, I have selected too many faces or there's just some that are leftover that are unnecessary once this neck piece is separate and not attached to the torso, right? Because some extra faces were added to sort of bridge the gap between the neck or the collar and torso. So I need to go ahead and clean up the bottom edge of this whole piece. Just using the drag tool because I have to make sure that every single vertice is in the exact spot. And once I've done that, I can just fill in the whole area with the cap tool, and then inset, or in this case, I use bevel because I want to go downwards a little bit of Well, doesn't really matter. Either way, I'm going to have to manually clean this up. But yeah, cap the area off, and then I can inset to get that nice ring of faces around the inner side. And then from there, I will be able to decide how I'm going to, you know, split this whole in gone into more useful quads. Now I can go ahead and reduce the vertices a little bit on the inner side because I don't need that many there. Although, you know, around the shoulder, be careful not to make it too sparse in terms of polygons. You don't want it to be too jagged on the inner shoulder area. But, because this is really not going to be very visible, I can go ahead and get rid of a lot of vertices along this inner edge, pretty much every other one. So I'm just going to quickly go ahead and do that. Using the target world tool and then dragging the vertices back into position. So that's a good start for the underside. Now, all I have to do is sort of roughly divide this underside up into quads or just a sort of topology that makes a little bit more sense. You probably could just collapse all of these down into one point in the middle. And you probably won't have any issues with that. But I think generally, slightly better practice is to divide it up into at least some quads that more or less follow the topology of the rest of the body. Now, it doesn't have to be very exact. You know, don't bother trying to copy all of the flow and the edges of the body, more or less, you know, some going horizontally across the torso and then a few vertically. So, you know, just to definitely avoid any sort of clipping that might occur if, you know, you raise a shoulder. And while there's plenty of geometry on the top of the neck piece to sort of support that bend, but if, you know, there wasn't any sort of geometry like that on the bottom side, it could potentially clip through. This case, it's unlikely, just because of the shape of the neck piece. But maybe on a different part on a different character, something like that could happen. So it's generally a good idea to sort of divide areas like that into rough quads that kind of makes sense. Doesn't have to be super pretty, but it helps a little bit. It's, you know, the slightly more professional thing to do, I think. Now going to make these little holes where the raw string comes into the neck. I'm just going to model them directly onto the surface. I'm not going to have this as a separate little piece like a button because having on the surface of this object and not as a separate piece will make it a lot easier to texture, and it will look more integrated with the rest of the hood. If this part was made separate, like a bolt on the mechanical arm, it would look a little bit rough. It wouldn't sort of look as attached to the surface, I feel like. This way, I'll have a nice bit of ambient occlusion, and I'll be able to sort of texture it accordingly together with the rest of this part. Going to add a few edge loops to make it look really round and not pointy. And the way I added those edge loops is with a shamfa I could have just used the Swift loop tool as well, but a Shamfa also does the same thing. And then I just used the conform tool to sort of conform the resulting shamp edges to the surface. The reason why I used the chamfer tool instead of just adding swift loops is just because, you know, there was a single edge loop running down the middle of this little metal detail. And what I wanted was instead of that one running down the middle was two edge loops running either side to sort of give it a rounder shape instead of something very pointy. And the great way to, you know, replace a single edge loop with two edge loops, either side is to just use a chamfer on that edge. Another thing you could do is do a swift loop either side of that edge and then delete the middle one. But the other nice thing with the champ tool is it lets you sort of spin the dial up and down and sort of check what kind of width you want. So, you know, sometimes I like to use the hampor tool for that. Just making swift loops is also fine. I use either. It's really just a matter of preference or sometimes you just decide to do things one way or the other. But yeah, it's good to know that, you know, you can use these tools for all sorts of things. You know, it's not just for making shampers when you need a shampa. Sometimes it's useful for maybe, you know, just adding edge loops in some area or something like that. There's also a bunch of options that come with the SHAFATol. You can make more than two edges pop up. You can make any number that you need, and there's a few options on how it interpolates between those edges as well. But that's more relating to modeling than it is to retpology. I only occasionally use SHAMFA in cases like this when it comes to retper. So I'm sort of trying to integrate this little ring better into the surrounding topology. But again, when it comes to details like this, it's pretty much just a matter of cutting in a bunch of triangles and linking them up to whatever vertice is closest. As always trying to avoid long thin triangles, better to make it wider than thinner. That's pretty much always the case when it comes to areas like this. The next thing I want to do is fixed up the edge of this neck piece. You can see that on the high poly, it's quite round, whereas here I've just got a flat rectangle end. It's a 90 degree angle between the sides, which, you know, does not give the impression at all that this part is around in any way. So what I need to do is add an extra edge loop to make this look like it's sort of bulging outwards and rounded. Now, you can also see that there's sort of two layers to the neck piece, and I could go ahead and model that into the low poly, but it doesn't seem like that sort of seam is deep enough or significant enough to where it wouldn't really bake down properly. So, you know, at this point in time, when I'm doing the low poly, definitely looks like it will be okay if I, you know, I don't do any sort of special topology to account for that little layering or that sort of seam between the bottom and the top part of this neck. Now, again, this is something to test out when you do your bakes. If I do my bakes and I see that, you know, maybe that seam doesn't look great when it's just baked down onto a flat plane, maybe I should add some topology to account for it, then I will go back and do that. So, yeah, you sort of have to get used to the idea that you can't always predict how something is going to look baked. And, you know, a lot of the time, the issue isn't that it's going to look bad when it's baked. It might look fine. You just might decide that you want it to look even better. That's the issue a lot of the time is, you know, this area will look fine regardless if I add extra topology to account for that little seam in the middle or if I don't the only question really is, how much better will it look if I add that extra geometry for that little scene? Because it could be negligible or not better at all. It might not really affect anything at all. It could be significant enough to where I want to go back and edit. To, you know, add in that little seam. And really, you know, unless, you know, maybe with decades of experience, that might be something you can judge out of the gate. But, you know, especially if you're someone that's still learning, I would say, just, you know, try one option, do your bags, and see how it looks. And then it doesn't take too long to do small edits like these afterwards. It's just not a linear process. You're always going back and forth. That's not to say that you should rush things and do such a shoddy job or your first time around that once you get to your test bakes, you realize that you need to redo everything. That's definitely not how you should be working. What I have in mind is just smaller details like these, where, you know, you can really get stuck racking your head about whether you should do it one way or the other. For example, what I'm doing right here with that little seam that goes on the neck piece. You know, myself, I'm really not sure how this will look baked. Well, I know it will definitely look fine. I just don't know whether I will want that additional detail of having that scene modeled in or not. And the only time I will know is once I see it when it is baked and, you know, I can set up the camera in Mama's et toolbg and do a test render to see, you know, what it will look like once I make my final renders and, you know, once I see that, then I can judge whether or not, you know, I should go back and add that. And, um you know, I feel like that's definitely a good way to approach these things. So you can see in a few paces here, the swift loop stops just because maybe I have some triangles going along the whole loop that goes around the front of this piece. So I do have to sort of do this in parts. You can see triangle right there as well because the swift loop tool stops as soon as it reaches the triangle. It only loops along edge loops, and an edge loop is, you know, basically a loop of quads, not anything involving a triangle. So, you know, I'm just going to quickly finish up that area with the cut tool instead of the edge tool instead of the swift loop, doesn't really make a difference again. And yeah, I need to carry on tidying up and making this part look round with that additional edge. There's also a few other areas I need to clean up slightly. And in general, whenever I spot something that maybe I don't quite like, I go ahead and fix it while I have the opportunity here. Um, hopefully, that's not too annoying to watch in the video. That's just sort of, you know, how I approach things. I tend to jump around a little bit. Sometimes, you know, when I notice something that definitely needs fixing because otherwise, it's very easy to forget and just, you know, never end up fixing it. I'm practically done with the hood here by now. Going to do a few little touch ups here and there. I don't think that the area where the hood, you know, links up with the neck here at the front is quite as good as what I did on the other side. I'm going to, you know, deepen in this little overhang a little bit. You do have to be a little bit careful with areas like this. They can be troublesome to bake because, you know, you'll have areas above and below clipping into each other in the baker. So you sort of have to adjust your cage in Mum's for areas like it is very important to keep baking in mind when you're making your low poly. You don't want to have to spend ages, you know, adjusting your bakes or adjusting your baked maps in photoshop after you've done a bake. So you definitely want to make your low poly that facilitates baking quite well. It's super important. So now that the neck piece was done, and it was separated off as its own part, as well as the torso. With these two pieces being separate, you know, I took another look at my model, and I was looking at this area where the cloth sort of meets the rest of the underlying torso and how those parts merge together. And, you know, looking at it, I thought maybe it would be best if I did the exact same thing that I did for the neck to all of these parts underneath because that seem where the cloth parts merged up with these mechanical hard surface parts, um it will look fine, but it might not look perfect. And I thought, You know what? Maybe I should separate them off as a separate part. It won't take too long, and it might make these parts look a little bit better. It will definitely add to the feel that these are separate and not sort of merged together, and, you know, it's not trickery, it's, you know, definitely two separate parts that aren't attached to each other in any way because you can see here, although this will break down fine and it will look perfectly acceptable. I feel like the final result would be slightly better if these parts were completely separate. Then, you know, in areas where these two parts are further from each other, where there's a slightly bigger gap, you can see that around the back, there's this little panel that sort of sticks out more for the shoulder blade and there's a resulting little gap forms. If I separate these parts out into separate measures, you know, gaps like that will look a lot better. And this won't take too long. It's really nothing too complicated. All I have to do is, you know, model the inside of the cloth a tiny bit and then do the same for the torso, pretty much extend everything out by one small edge loop. And in that case, those two parts will be separate. Baking will be a lot easier because I'll be able to bake these parts separately. Texturing will be a little bit easier because I'll be able to isolate them in substance painter and treat them as the separate objects that they are. I won't have to worry about the ID maps and sort of making sure that the edge between these two parts isn't blurry in all of the textures. And in the bakes and the materials, I don't have any sort of bleeding across, when you're making masks, they're not always perfect, and you can sort of have sort of bit of a jagged edge, and it's sort of something you have to look out for in your texture, so you have to make sure that these parts look separate if they are merged together. And if I just detach them from each other, all those things won't be an issue. So I decided to, you know what, I'm going to do a little bit of extra work, and I'm going to make these parts truly separate like they are on the high poly and it'll just give an overall better result. So that's what I'm doing now. First thing I did was clean up the edge, so sort of line up all the vertices with the inner edge of this cloth. Then I'm just going to extrude it all downwards a little bit and scale it inwards in order to get a little bit of that internal cloth modeled in and once I've extruded and sort of scaled it down a little bit, so it's, you know, roughly in the place I needed to be as close as I can, without, you know, using any modeling tools, I can go ahead and use the drag tool to line it up. Basically, I'm lining them up with the same vertice that is on the opposite side of this cloth. Now, luckily, when I was modeling it, I made sort of outlining edge loop around the entire edge of this cloth, and that gives me a very good spot to line things up with. And, you know, that is a pretty good topology for this sort of area. And this is pretty much all that needs to be done for this part. And now I need to go ahead and do the same for the body underneath. So I'm adding an Edit Poly to make sure that, you know, I can always go back if I do anything wrong. And, um, going to go ahead and just start extruding bit by bit, an extra edge loop that just sort of goes inwards a little bit. Now, in this area, I have to extrude outwards a little bit more because the gap between the cloth and the body is a little bit bigger. But the plus side is that those gaps will sort of read a little bit better in the final object because you'll sort of instead of, you know, before when they were merged to each other, it was just a really shallow pocket. Now it'll definitely look like cloth sort of hanging above the body, I feel like it'll definitely be an improvement in these areas. And again, just like what I did with the cloth, I am sort of trying to line up this new geometry with the underlying geometry, and that is to avoid clipping. If the vertices are in a similar place underneath each other, then basically when they're skinned, they will have basically the same vertex weights, and they will be deformed in the same way as each other. So basically, that eliminates any sort of clipping when you're moving parts. If they weren't lined up, the potential for clipping is definitely a lot bigger, and you can have issues with geometry poking through when you do maybe a more extreme movement. And that's especially important when the distance between these two layers is very small. This is just a thin piece of cloth, so I definitely need to pay attention. Now, lower down, I'm not actually extruding any new geometry. I'm just pulling the existing edge loops down because I already have a bunch of edge loops in that area. So there's no reason to pull off a new quad in those areas. Around the front, I didn't want to pull the geometry out because that would make those quads kind of stretched out compared to all of the other existing geometry. So all I'm doing is just trying to maintain consistency with the other parts. Now that I am zoomed in quite close to this area, I'm sort of noticing that I might want to tweak a little bit of the existing geometry on the torso to maybe get a slightly better result. Just some really minor tweaks over here, moving a few vertices around 39. 38 Retopology Final Chapter: To Chapter 38. This is going to be the last chapter when it comes to re topo. And what I'm going to be doing in this chapter is really finalizing everything, bringing it together, making sure there are no gaps between pieces and stuff like that. Thest thing I need to do with this torso is make sure I turn on backface culling. This will basically make the back faces of all the faces invisible. And this is how objects are rendered in game engines and in MamozeteTol bag, as well, unless you turn on two sided meshes, but that sort of doubles the rendering cost of all objects, which is why it's not done. And this will let me effectively check for gaps because the backfaces aren't visible. So, you know, anytime that I can see backfaces, those wouldn't be present in any sort of engine, which is why I need to set it up the same way in three MAX. The next thing I'm going to do is set up some contrasting colors, so I can really tell when backfaces are visible because right now the background is gray and the object is gray, so that doesn't really help me see now it does it. So what I'm going to do is give this a nice bright color. Something like a bright yellow that will really contrast and stand out from the background. And once I've done this, what I'm going to go ahead and do is change the color of the background as well, so it contrasts with the yellow because shadows are still kind of gray and black, even when I've got the object color set to yellow, so I want the background to not be grayscale. I want it to be color so I can distinguish it even better. So first thing I'm going to do when it comes to the background is change it to a solid color and not a gradient. So I'm going to go up to the top of the viewport and click on default shading and just go into the drop down menu and select solid color. Next up, I'm going to change the actual color of the background. So going up to customized viewport, scroll down in the top little scroll window to viewport background and just change the color and click Apply Color. And that changes your color. Now, don't set it to something too bright because that'll sort of strain your eyes. You don't want to get tired just looking at the screen. Something a little bit more desaturated works fine. And this is a great setup for being able to identify gaps in your geometry, like you can see one right here on the back, and this is going to help me really quickly get rid of any gaps that are left, which is all that's left to do on this character. So when it comes to filling in the gaps, there's basically two ways to do it without merging the parts together. Now, of course, you could actually weld these parts together. But if I do weld them together, that will sort of make it harder for me to bake them, because ideally, I want to be able to bake the cloth parts and all of the torso parts separately. That's one of the reasons why I'm making these parts separate. So I won't be welding these parts together. The other issue with welding them together is it will be a little bit more work to match up all the topology between these two parts. And there's really no reason to actually do it. You know, there's no benefit to welding these two parts together. Once they've been sort of split up in this way and I'm modeling the underlying parts. What I had done previously when these parts were merged together, that's, you know, much better than if I were to weld up what I've done with the topology now, which is, you know, extend it inwards a little bit. Once you've done something like this, what I'm doing here, you know, there's really no reason to weld these parts together. It's better to keep them separate. So even when you do have them separate, there's still two ways you can kind of handle it. Now, they're not really all that different. The only thing is, you know, one way you can guaranteedly hide gaps is to basically clip either parts of the geometry into each other. So what you do is you take the planes from the shirt and the planes from the torso, and you make them intersect ever so slightly, and that guarantees you don't have any holes. The other thing you can do is simply, you know, just extend them down a little bit. And if you extend them down far enough, even if they don't clip into each other, often, what you'll have is it's basically impossible to position the camera in a way such that you can actually see the gap because the gap will always be obstructed by, you know, other parts of the geometry. So basically, it becomes impossible to find a camera angle from which you can see that gap. Both of these options work fine. Clipping all of the planes into each other is a little bit more work, and it's not always necessary, especially in areas where the gaps are, you know, smaller or, you know, the two surfaces are very close to each other. And in those cases, I don't really find it necessary to really go ahead and clip all of the planes into each other. And I just tend to leave them as is, as long as I don't see the gap. In other cases, where the holes are a little bit larger, I will go ahead and just clip the planes into each other because extending the topology outwards, it would just be too much extra topology, and it would sort of be a bit wasteful. So I will extend the topology outwards a little bit and then go ahead and clip the planes into each other just to, you know, save that little bit of geometry and space. So yeah, those are the two ways I'm going to handle this. You can see right here this little area where sort of body has a little bit of a gap because there's a sort of thicker panel above and below this section. So the cloth sort of hangs in the air over the gap between those two sections, and there's a little bit of a gap. I find areas like this pretty cool on a character. It sort of really grounds the character in that sense. Because this is exactly what you would see on a real character. You know, cloth hangs from the body. Now with on older console generations and in general, older Gama from maybe a couple of years ago, five or more, stuff like this would be avoided. Essentially, you would either just not have things like this in the high poly. And, you know, just make those plates a little bit thinner or just stuff something in that gap, or you would sort of fudge it and make that hole really shallow and just put an ambient occlusion, really dark ambient occlusion in that area and just have a shadow hide that hole. Now that the budgets are there, I actually like areas like this because they really sort of ground the character, and it feels pretty real when you have gaps like this. Now, I know this concept isn't exactly super realistic. This is a bit more of a stylized character, even though I'm going to be texturing it in a fairly realistic way. You know, maybe realism isn't super important here, but I still think it's a cool detail that I like to include, and, you know, I just think I like stuff like this. I like characters with a lot of layering of clothing, and I like it when those layers actually look like they're separate layers, and they're distinct. So that's one of the reasons why I like doing stuff like this, even though it can be a little bit tedious. If you want to avoid that tedium, yeah, you should definitely sort of go for maybe concepts that don't have this much stuff. There have been cases where, you know, I've been been off more than I can chew and, like, picked a character concept with a bunch of layers to it, and then had nightmare doing the actual topo to the point where I didn't really want to do that character anymore. So, you know, um sort of decide how patient you are and how much of this sort of stuff you want to put up with when you're picking your concepts. There's nothing wrong with picking something with maybe less sort of cavities and layers like this if you don't feel like doing stuff like this. I think there's definitely cool designs that don't need this kind of stuff. But I kind of like it when they're a little You know, I just feel like it really grounds characters when you have stuff like that. Like when you make the cloth, really look like it is just hanging over the character, and it's not just part of the actual model is what I'm trying to say. So I'm going around and extending the bottom edge downwards along most of this cloth, just to, you know, especially in areas where the gaps between the cloth and the body are a little bit bigger for the reasons that I explained earlier. And you can see any sort of gaps really stand out when the background is blue and the body is yellow. I can see them instantly. So it's actually at least when I was learning, I found it very hard to find resources on this specific subject, right? Like, how do you connect up all of these separate elements of your character? I understood read topology fairly well. I knew about sculpting and texturing and UV mapping, all that stuff. And there was a lot of material online. I could easily find it. But the thing I really couldn't find much info about was, you know, how do I work with different layers of clothing? Like, how do I handle that sort of topology or, you know, how do I handle where the arm goes into the sleeve? What do I do into that little hole? Do I cap that area off? Do I model the inside of the sleeve? What do I do there, right? And I really struggled to find a lot of material there. The best places for these kinds of resources that I found were just full character tutorials that taught you the entire process of a character. Creation, just like this one. And even those could sometimes be flawed because a lot of the time when you're doing portfolio pieces or personal work, you know, even professional artists, they don't want to bother with the tedium of these little, like, technical things that are really mainly applicable to game engine stuff, right? When you're actually in a production and working on real game assets that are going to be used in a game for personal work, you don't really need to bother with this stuff. Like if it's not going to be visible in most of your renders, or sometimes even if you do have gaps in your renders, it's very easy to just go into Photoshop and tweak your final renders, just fill in those little holes. Um, so, you know, in some tutorials that I found, which we still great tutorials for all the other content, sometimes that stuff would just be skipped or not a huge amount of detail was put into those kinds of things. And even in this tutorial, even though I'm doing my best to explain a lot of this stuff, it's all still mostly going to be applicable to only this character. And if you're working on your own character, you know, just seeing me do this once and explain it once for this specific character might not be enough for you. And really the best resource for this kind of stuff is looking up models from actual games. So, you know, in some games, maybe you have a free camera. And you can really look around the model from all directions, and you can try and figure out what's going on there. Or some games have a photo mode where, you know, you can put the camera wherever you want. So you can really take a look at maybe areas where different parts of the body link up. That's one of the ways, and that's maybe the easiest way to do it if you have a game like that on hand, and you sort of want to make models that are similar to that in style. The other thing you can do is find ripped models online, and that is going to be your best resource. You know, I really think that's one of the best ways to learn stuff. You can find images a lot of the time, but it's, you know, images of wireframes and stuff like that on hard station and on other sites. Those don't really usually go into the details of the different elements of a model. So your best bet is going to be actually finding models. You can rip them yourself from some games. I'm not an expert on the topic. I'm not very good at it. The tools for that are usually, you know, not GUI based, so it's a little bit tricky. I'm not great at it. But I have tried it for games that I'm interested on how they actually made the models. The other thing you can do is, you know, find the models online if you just search for Model Rip plus the game title. I think I've said this before. But I want to emphasize this for this specific topic, if you're struggling on the question on how to fit the pieces of your character together, how are you going to fit the hands into the sleeves? How are you going to fit the arms onto the torso if, you know, the character's got a vesta like this on, how is the torso going to fit into the pants if, you know, the belly is visible or even if it's a shirt fitting into the pants, how is that done? Are all of these parts merged together into one, or are they separate elements that are just clipped into each other? And it's different in every game. It's different with every style. Every studio has their own pipeline. There's no right way to do it. There's lots of wrong ways to do it. I'm showing you one of the right ways to do it for this character. I showed you another way to do it kind of accidentally because I changed my mind while I was making this character, right? So, you know, you can see how I would have done it if I was to merge all these parts together. But the way I decided that would be best for this character is if they were separate. So, yeah. But if you want to see examples that are maybe more specific to a project you're working on and maybe you have a game in mind for a portfolio piece that you're doing or a personal project that you're doing, like maybe you're making some sort of resineval fan or a character like that, go online, look up model rips from that game, and, you know, take a look at how all the elements fit together. Now, for Resident Evil, at least, what I have seen is very similar to what's being done here. So, you know, the characters are fairly realistic. They're wearing jackets. The jackets are unzipped, so you can see their shirt under the jacket, stuff like that. And, you know, I was curious on how they fit those parts together. The game came out a couple of years ago, and, you know, I was still trying to learn and brush up on my skills back then, and I was curious how they fit those parts together. And yeah, they're very similar to this, which is basically separate elements, and they just sort of model in fairly deep behind other topology that is in front of those parts. So they model in a section of the shirt that is underneath the jacket. But once they go far enough to where the camera will never reach, they just, you know, end the topology right there, and everything else is just, you know, left empty. And that's how they did it there. And that's sort of, you know, somewhat what this is, I guess, inspired by, or, you know, that's one of the places where I sort of picked up this way of joining things up together from so, you know, I feel like this definitely works. Studios definitely do it this way. It's definitely a common way to approach things, and so is the other option I showed you earlier. When you're working on modular characters, things can be also different once again. So right here, I am welding the arm to the rest of the torso. Now, I didn't do this for the other arm. And the reason why is that arm is made of skin. So it's going to have a completely different material, and also it's got that shirt over it. And that shirt has sort of a little bit of a gap between the shirt and the body. So I felt like there's no real reason to connect those parts together. Better do leave them separate. On this side, there is not as much sleeve on the mechanical side of the body. Right? So there's not really a seam between these two parts. So I'm just going to connect this mechanical arm to the rest of the torso because it's the same material. There's nothing obscuring it, and it sort of makes more sense. In this case, there's no, like, really big difference between these materials or a significant gap between these two parts of the body, either. So for this side of the body, I'm going to be merging everything together. So this is really straightforward, just sort of bridging in order to form that little step, that little gap between these two parts, and this should work out fairly well. Now, this is a little bit of a tricky area. You can see that I'm getting some kind of diagonal quads here. So I need to make sure to add some cuts to make sure they're triangulating in the right direction because as you can see, the bottom quad was sort of triangulating in sort of very bad way opposite to what the actual shape of the surface is. So whenever you see a quad that's like that, make sure to at the very least, you know, cut it in the direction that it should be triangulating. Or maybe take a look at the surrounding topology and see if maybe something needs to be changed. Now, the bottom of the arm is going to be a little bit tricky to weld up just because there's several elements coming together in the armpit area. And firstly, the visibility is not great, although it's quite good that I'm able to see this from the backside. That's very convenient. But, yeah, I sort of have to be careful. Now, you'll notice that I'm using the Connect tool to add the extra edges I need to be able to weld these parts up. Now the reason I'm using the Connect tool and not the cut tool that I usually use is because I can't cut on back faces. It just doesn't work if you're cutting from behind. And if I was to cut from the front, I can't cut because the top edge of these faces is hidden behind the arm. So, you know, I would have to sort of jump through hoops and maybe hide some geometry if I wanted to add these cuts in or flip those faces, which isn't something I really wanted to do. So instead, what I can do is select the top and the bottom edge of these faces, and you see connect to add some edges connecting between those top and bottom edges instead. So that's a little bit of a workaround and maybe a trick you can use if you also end up in a tricky situation like that. Now, of course, the arm needs a little bit more topology because it's a lot rounder and smaller than the torso. So I'm reducing a lot of these polygons down as soon as they reach the torso, because I just don't need them there because the torso is so much bigger and the amount of roundness there isn't as much as there is on this arm. Now, here I was looking at this little panel line or indent that I see here that I modeled into the low poly and noticed it's super shallow and not doing anything for the silhouette, really. So I chose to get rid of it and weld it down. And I'm looking at it with the camera and it seems to get deeper a little bit further in. So what I'm going to do is maybe leave it where it is lower down and significantly deeper here, but maybe just get rid of it at the very top where it sort of fizzles out. That looks like it might be a good compromise. But I also need to make sure that I'm not really messing up the surrounding topology while I'm doing this merger. And this is one of those little tricky areas that I mentioned. I've got this little plate that sort of sticks outwards in the armpit area, and I have to sort of figure out how to weld it into the rest of the torso while maintaining that shape. Another thing you can do to check for holes, sometimes you can't really see them. Just grab C and move it around. And that way, you'll be able to spot any maybe very narrow gaps or maybe just edges that aren't connected to each other. That's the arm done now, and I can move on to the next part. Which is connecting to the bottom of the tossa or the legs and the hips. So typically, how this is done and is just to have a cap on the bottom on the bottom of the torso and the top of the legs. That way, you know, there's not going to be any holes there. This is usually how you would do it on a modular character as well. Sometimes it's just an empty space as well. I oroption is used. Um, but usually if major parts of clothing like this, it's quite uncommon for them to actually be merged together into one, like the pants merged to the torso, unless maybe it's a slightly lower fidelity character or something stylized or something like that. It's pretty common for these two parts to just be left separate. I've noticed that I didn't really include this little detail in the low poly of the pants when I did it. I must have forgotten. So I'm going to go ahead and extrude this out just so it's there. And this is pretty common to happen. There's so much stuff to re topper that I find myself at least occasionally forgetting little details like this. And it's not a big deal to just add them back in later whenever you notice. So that's what I'm doing here. Cutting around ahead of time to make sure it's well integrated into the surrounding geometry. Something like this should do fine, and I can start to extrude it outwards. So just a simple extrude and then lining up the resulting edges with the top of this little tab or whatever this detail is meant to be. I'd have to check the concept just to make sure, which is, what I'll be doing when I get around to texturing. You need to make sure that you're referencing the concept and seeing what parts are what. Of course, some concepts are kind of vague on details like this, and in that case, it's up to your own interpretation, just do whatever is cool. Maybe if you're a beginner, pick a concept that is more rendered out, more fleshed out, so you have to think a little bit less about questions like this. But this concept I have is really nicely rendered and doesn't really leave any questions. Once you know what you're doing, it can be fun to pick one of the more loose sketches and figure out things for yourself and interpret them the way you like. In industry, it's pretty common to have pretty rough concept sketches just because, you know, Well, in the first place, you have the concept artist at hand most of the time, and you can ask them for specific questions. Also, a lot of the time, on big projects, you know, there's already sort of established styles, so you can reasonably interpret what's going on. You also have like a lead or some sort of art director telling you what's going on. And, you know, a lot of the time it's just something that happens due to, you know, shortages of time and stuff like that. So, um, but in general, if you're a pro, you should be able to interpret a more rough concept. As a beginner, I would suggest maybe picking more specific ones where they're rendered out more fully and that sort of makes it easier on yourself because you don't have to think about a concept while you're modeling things. So, re topoing in the top of this fabric part. Sort of neglected the whole top of the pants a little bit when I was doing the re topo of the pants. I'm having to go back and finish this area up a little bit. You can see the folds at the top haven't had any work put into them really. And Sari is still quite visible. So I definitely need to give it a good go and make these folds read quite well. Especially in areas where things intersect with other objects, this part is going to be quite visible, and it's sil wet. It's going to show up against the body because this will be a different color and a different material to whatever fabric is on the torso. So it'll be very visible. So it's important to not neglect this area and make it quite well. So to not have any jaggedness These parts where the sort of cloth square bends over and tucks into the pants are a little bit tricky. But I've done quite a few similar areas on this model before. So I think there's a lot of examples on how to handle that kind of area in this tutorial already. Um, you know, it's hard. You can't really follow the existing flow of the topology here, but you can roughly figure it out without making it too messy. Sometimes you do have to get a little bit messy and just, you know, put a bunch of triangles in an area just to get it to work if it's sort of very odd shape like the way the cloth talks over there. Now I'm going to extrude downwards a little just to give this a little bit of depth going downwards before capping it off, and that's to make the pants look like they're separate part and not just clipped into the torso. It's better if I give it a little bit of a gap instead of just capping it off here because I don't want the cap to be visible at all. I'd much rather there be a little gap between the pants and torso instead of some weird shadowy cap, showing up. But these are really sort of nit picky, really insignificant things, you know, when it comes to the whole totality of the character, stuff like this isn't really going to show up in renders. So, you know, I don't let it bother you too much. I'm really just being quite nit picky here and, you know, maybe even overthinking things slightly. But yeah, this is more or less the way I would do. Uh, instead of just capping it immediately, sinking it down a little bit to hopefully increase, the impression that it's a separate part, which it is, but I think you know what I mean. I can also easily just reduce the amount of polygons down here because, like I said, this area isn't very visible. I don't need all that many here. So now I can collapse all of the faces down into this flat cap here, and this is going to be how I attach the body to the pants. Now you can see that there is a little bit of clipping between the body and the pants there. So that's something I need to clean up on the low poly. It could be that well, I'm guessing the main issue here is that I did not line up the edge loops on the pants with the ones on it also. Because I did forget to count and have the same number of edge loops on the pants and the torso. So that's a little bit of an issue, and I definitely should have done that. It's not the end of the world, and it can definitely be, you know, fixed fairly easily. I just have to do a little bit of adjustment on the low poly now and it's not just that some of it is just clipping because the vertices are placed in slightly the wrong area. The tolerrant here between these two parts is very slim because, you know, it's such a narrow part that even if I'm a tiny bit off, I will get a little bit of clipping. So I'm going to have to spend a few minutes fixing this area up and making it work well. Adding a few extra polygons around the edge where I need them. Maybe as a heads up, I will say that ideally, you might want to have the same number of edge loops in your pants as you do in your torso. It's not entirely essential, but it might be a slightly better practice than what I ended up doing here. It might help avoid this issue a little bit. Um it's situationally dependent, of course. Sometimes you don't need that many in the pants, but near the top where your lining lose two parts up, it definitely helps to avoid any of that jaggedness. Now, briefly, moving back up to the top, I did remember that I need to cap in the bottom of this part where the neck comes in because otherwise, there will be a massive gap here visible. I'm going to go ahead and do that now. But right before I do that, there was a messed up courtesy here, so I'm having to fix it and back to this now. The first thing I'm going to do is slightly even out the edge loop running down here before I extend it downwards. So moving all of these edges up to a consistent width of this loop of polygons. Or I should rather say that I'm moving them up to where they are on the outer side so that the inner sides and the outer sides topology matches. I'm just eyeballing it roughly. I'm not being super precise here. If I wanted to be super precise, I would have to use, you know, an orthographic perspective and look from one of the sides instead of from a diagonal view because, of course, things are going to line up exactly if I'm looking at these things diagonally, but this is more than close enough. It doesn't have to be super precise for it to be good enough. And yeah, I'm going to keep the density fairly high up for the area that is still going to be clearly visible, and then a little bit lower down, I can start to lower the amount of polygons I'm using. Right now, I'm just going to check if I'm missing any mesh that connects the head to the torso here because there is a little bit of a gap between them, and I want to make sure that I didn't forget any sort of mesh that is connecting them. Now, it's perfectly fine to not model in areas, especially in the high poly that aren't ever visible. So the gap between the torso and the head in the hi poly is completely fine. This is okay because this is an area that is not meant to be visible and it's meant to be hidden by this hood piece. So there's no issue with having it like that. I was just double checking to make sure that I haven't lost something or forgotten it. And, you know, once I knew that I didn't go back and hide the head and get back to work. Now that I know there is nothing in between the torso and the head, I know that I need to definitely cap off the bottom of this hoodie neck piece, because, you know, if there was something connecting the neck to the rest of the torso, what I could have done is, you know, left that in or modeled that into the low poly and had that visible in the rendans the whole parts that are underneath the hood. And then I would have sort of made the hood like a doughnut, kind of like how it actually is meant to be in the high poly. But because there is nothing in between those parts, what I'm going to do is just cap it off at the bottom, and then I will give it a very dark ambient occlusion and make it pitch black and it'll just render out like a big shadow. And that is how you hide sort of holes and gaps like this fairly well. Now, of course, this doesn't work if, you know, the hole is pretty shallow and then the viewer can clearly see that you've just put a black hole in that area. But when it's a little bit deeper like this, the shadow from the ambient occlusion map and the dark diffuse color becomes a lot more plausible and, you know, doesn't catch your eye that much. And it's a very good way of hiding areas like this, putting in a very dark ambient occlusion and then also toning down the base color significantly to make it quite dark down there. Um, it's a little bit of a cheaty way to do this. But a lot of what goes into making games is cheating and tricks to achieve the graphical effects. It's not all based on physical simulation, it's all tricks and smoke and mirrors to get the results that are needed. Because you could never simulate things like this in real time, right? You never model everything in perfectly in real time. Everything is sort of just an approximation, a trick, and this is one of those ways you can sort of trick your way out of a situation like this. So now with this front part, I think I said before there's a little bit of an issue with it in the fact that it is a two D plane with no back face, and I'm going to have to do something about it, but I think I might leave that to, you know, when I'm baking. For now, I'm going to sort of have the whole neckpiece as a separate model and then clip this front plane thing in at the front. Now, I am approaching this a little bit as if it was a game model. In Mama Zip Tolbag, of course, when you're making renders, you don't have to worry about two sided faces because, you know, realistically, it's not going to be an issue. You're not too worried about performance in Mama Zip Tolbag or when you're making character renders because, you know, you will be able to run a single character pretty much regardless of what you do to it on your computer and make renders, right? Yeah. I'm not making something for a playable game here, but I do want to teach you guys good industry practices here and not just, you know, teach you the bare minimum of what it takes to make up portfolio piece. Everything I'm seeing here is sort of more geared towards industry advice, maybe a little bit. That being said, you can take shortcuts when you're making portfolio pieces. So stuff like that little plane at the front, little fabric piece at the front, being a single sided plane. If you wanted to, you know, go ahead and make it two sided, two sided material, and, you know, you can skip giving it thickness and all that in your renders. It's really not an issue, and it's not going to make this piece look worse in a portfolio. Definitely, you know, it won't stand out to anyone looking as, you know, something detrimental to the piece. So you can, if you want to use a two sided material for that part. Okay, pretty much finally done here. I'm going to put the colors back to normal. I'm leaving one of those pouches as red just so I know which one I need to edit later on. And that's all for the topology, pretty much. And we can finally move into UV mapping. So thanks for watching. That's all for this chapter. Please head on over to the section that contains all of the UV mapping. Those chapters will be numbered separately just to make it a little bit easier to sort through everything, so, you know, you don't have to sort through dozens and dozens of chapter to find what you want. Things are going to be broken down into smaller segments like that. So yeah, thanks for watching. I hope you've managed to bear through the long process of Rtopo just fine. And yeah, let's move on to UV mapping. 40. Bonus Zwarp Demonstration: Hi, guys. This is a little bonus chapter demonstrating ZAP. Now, I'm not going to be using ZAP for the whole rest of the tutorial. This is just a demonstration for those that might want to use it. And if you do decide to use it, it will still be easy to follow along with the rest of the tutorial. All ZAP does is speed up the very first part of retpology which is laying down the main edge flow. And then from there on all the detailing stuff and figuring out the folds and the details specific to the high polymodal you retapologize. You're still going to be able to follow along with that part. And Z RAP is really simple. So I think it's worth showing here for those that decide they do want to get ZAP and use it. So I've got a little demo scene of the glove prepped here, so I can show you how I use ZAP. Now, ZAP is a plug in for Zbrush. It's also a standalone software, but I think for character artists purposes, unless you're in a more technical role or I'm not sure, really, but I prefer the plug in. I haven't really used standalone version, so if you do plan on getting it, I'd say go for the plug in. So this is going to be a quick demonstration where I show you how I use Z RAP. It's a great time saver, and I'd highly recommend it. And then after this, I'll also be showing you how I do in three y MAX. It's a little bit slower. It's not an efficient of a workflow, but I will show you how to do it in three DS Max just in case, you know, some of you won't have access to ZRP. So this is just going to be a quick demonstration. I don't think I'll be using the results from this Z Rap further along in the tutorial. This is just to show you how to use ZAP, basically. And we'll be doing most of the stuff in three S MAX. So if you really don't want to, you can skip this part, but I recommend taking a look at how ZAP works in case, you know, you want to get it or something. So the way ZAP works is it takes the first two subtols in your subtol list. And if I remember correctly, the first one is your high poly and the second one is your low poly. So make sure in that order, we'll see once I start ZAP, actually. Yeah. And another issue with ZAP is if your subtol has separate meshes in it, it's composed of several parts, then it won't really work as well, and I'll try and wrap each of them individually. So it's much better to try and merge all of your objects into one when you're using ZAP. Now, a way you can do this is with Dynamesh. If you set it to quite a high resolution and dynamesh, that can work to sort of merge everything together, but it can also give you some issues on thin walled meshes like this. I'm going to set this quite high. But if you set it too high, then ZAP won't work so well either. So it's a bit of a balance. But that's a quick solution to that problem. I think my mesh was a little bit too high, poly there. I think what I'll do is I'll dynamesh it at a high resolution and then just so we don't have any holes in the mesh or at least a few holes as possible. A, don't worry about getting a mesh to be perfect with ZAP, because after ZAP, then you can use all of the Actually, before I do this, I should duplicate this original hand so I can show you. But after you use ZAP to do, like, the rough work, what you'll use projection to sort of get it more perfect. So it's okay to sort of, you know, if you have to dynamesh your object, it's okay to sort of deform it a little bit, compared to the final result like I'm doing here, I use inflate to get rid of those holes just in case. Now, to sort of get it to a lower polycomt to where it will work in ZAP, I'm going to decimate it. And I'll just check if it's all one mesh by clicking Auto groups. Auto groups will assign a polygroup to each separate mesh in the subtol. So if you hit Auto groups and it's just one polygroup, that means you're good to go. And 24,000 is I've had success with up to 80,000 polygons. So maybe more. I can't remember exactly. So that should be fine. So now we can launch Camp again. Okay. So you can see, it's no loading for some reason. That can be an issue with the mesh. Sometimes you just need to restart Z brush. But in this case, what's happened is I got confused. So let me just correct myself. The low poly goes on top and the high poly goes underneath. So make sure you do that. And now if I do that, there won't be any issues, and it loads instantly. So this is what Z wrap looks like. And what we'll do is put points on both meshes in the same place and that will sort of help the plug in, align these meshes and wrap the low poly over the high poly. So what I do for hands is first things first is tip of each finger. And of course, they're numbered. You need to make sure that you do things in the correct order when you're working because if you mix things up, those points, you know, each number will go to its corresponding point. If you mix them up, then you'll have things going to the wrong place. Now, you can swap sides when you're working. You can do this side first, then that side, it doesn't matter. But, you need to make sure you do things in the correct order. Now I'm going to do one for each knuckle. I like to do the inner part of the finger as well, between the knuckles to make sure they get in there. And I'll do the same for the backside. Fingers. And I'll think I'll skip doing the insides of the knuckles. But the more you do, the more accurate you'll get. But if you put too many points in, you'll start to stretch between those points. So, I mean, don't obsess over doing too many points. It'll probably be faster to adjust the few tiny issues that are left over once you're done by hand, instead of trying to get it to wrap perfectly straight in ZAP. Now, what you want to do before you go any further is make sure to save both of the points. So for the low poly, click Save, and name it something like ZAP. He, you want to make sure that you know which one's the low poly and which ones the high poly. All those files do is store the position of every single point. So if you want to do this again, if you finish your ZAP and you think there's something that isn't quite right, you just load these files and it'll put the points back where they were. So now we can click wrapping and first, we can match scale. So it will match scale according to the distance between each point, roughly, based on averages, I'm guessing, and then rigid alignment to get it into place as close to each point as it can. And then we can click Start wrapping. Now I feel like this didn't quite do a good job. So I'm going to go back to select points and I'll add points for this rim because I ended up clipping through the whole mesh. So rushing a bit here, you would probably want to take your time a bit more, but this is just a demonstration. So it's done, but you can see there's a few issues, and those are because this is basically a two sided mesh with the Apian wall. Same issue we had when we were doing Rtopoth DS Max. When you have that inner wall, it makes issues with snapping. So you can see some of these going to the outer side the glove and some of these are going to the inner side. So we'll click Done. I'm going to undo the ZAP on this. So when you do ZAP, it will just end up in your undo history, so you can just click back. And I'm going to slightly adjust our high poly so that it so it works in Z Z rap a bit better. So I'm going to initialize a cylinder and move it into position. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cap the end of the glove off. That should do. And I'll merge down. And we'll hit Dynamesh. And this dynamo should have gotten rid of the inner side of that glove dynamos tries to make a solid object. It doesn't really care about vertices on the inside. So now we can decimate this again. And we can try ZAP again. Now we'll load our points from those files we saved before. So the low goes to the low one and the high goes to the high one. Now, it looks like on the high one, these haven't really aligned properly. And that happens if you change the topology or the mesh too much. So what we did was we dynamised and we decimated and that's changed everything quite a bit. So I'm just going to reset the ones on the high poly and try to manually put them back. So zero was on the thumb. And then the next points were on the knuckles. Now, if you have hundreds of points, it can just be easier to redo them all on both sides because you'll spend so much time trying to figure out which points go where. But for this glove, it's not too many points. I can find my way around pretty well. Now, to remove a point, you just Control click, and you can also click on a point to drag it around. So I'm looking for the 20th point somewhere. I can't seem to find it. Here it is. And 21 is over here. 23. Then we also added a few points around here last time to get it to work better before we save. Okay, I'll save these new points over the same file. And we can try wrapping again. Now, it's going super fast now because I've decimated the hi poly quite low. It will take a little bit longer on your end. Looks like these knuckles are sort of getting shifted around a bit unevenly. But you can see it's aligning to the hi poly quite well. We just need to move these knuckles around a bit. Okay, let's try again. So this one looks a bit better now. So one's still quite wonky. Now, usually I get a bit of a better result. I might just be because of, you know, these particular maybe I've rushed a bit with the placement of the points, but this is a decent result. Also, this sort of demonstrates isn't quite as dramatic because my low poly kind of looks like a glove, and this high poly is also a glove. So it doesn't look like it's doing that much. What I think I'll do is I'll demonstrate a head, as well, and that'll show off Z rapid a little bit better. But even this is quite a good start. Now, what we can do to quickly clean it up a little bit in Z rush is smooth it over with a slightly lower intensity. We can also use the move tool to move things around a bit better. And then we can project all. So that's how I adjust measures after Zap. I do the first part in zer, and then I sort of move things around, smooth them out a bit, and reproject them. So you don't get, of course, the fine control you do in a modeling software like three years Max or blender or anything in Zbrush when it comes to, you know, precise placement of vertices. So, you know, I get rid of the worst parts in Zbrush. But to get the precise final finish, I always end up moving into three years Max Anyway. But this is like 90% of the work done. So you can see with those few little adjustments. It looks pretty good. For a low poly. I also use this one sculpting if I have a dynameshed mesh, and I want to have a nice clean topology for sculpting, especially for things like heads. Instead of using Zi mesher, I'll bring in a base mesh, Z wrap it to the head. And then what I'll do in order to get all of the detail back from my dynameshed sculpt, I will subdivide it a few times and reproject it. Now, in this case, it's projecting slightly to the opposite side of the mesh or it's not in range, we can try projecting a lower subdivision level or inflating parts of this mesh to go outside of the high polyly. So, with a bit of cleanup, pushing these around and reprojecting them again. You can see I have a nice clean topology to sculpt on with subdivision levels. So that's a trick I use for sculpting. I'm going to bring in a head and the base mesh and show you how I would do this for a head really quickly, maybe with a little bit less commentary because I went over everything with a glove. I just want to show you how much of a time saver it can be. Also I think I did say that I would show you how to Xrap a head when we did the head retpper I'll try and keep that promise. Okay, so I inputed our character's head and I decimated it just to prove that, you know, this isn't because our character already had good topology because you worked on a base mesh of good topology. But say if you didn't have good topology, you were working on a dynamic sculpt or a Z remeshed sculpt and you wanted perfect topology ready for animation, or you have good topology, but you want a different one. You know, so this is just to prove that, you know, this has bad top and we're going to fix it with ZRp? I've inported a base mesh. Let's get rid of that glove. So this is a base smash that comes with high resolution skin textures. And what this is also good for is, you know, you get to keep all of your UVs and everything, so you can do your rough secondary sculpt and then use a base mesh. So you don't have to do pause because if your base mesh comes with a high resolution displacement map, you can skip sculpting pores and all that stuff, and you'll have good UVs, as well. So here's our low poly. And here's our high poly. I think the low poly goes on top. If I haven't forgotten that already, I'll start ZAP. Let's just we don't really need that texture file. Now, when we're working on symmetrical measures, turn on symmetry, so you don't have to do anything twice with both sides of the face. And I guess I'll give you some pointers on where the best parts are to put points for the face. Now, I think it's fairly self explanatory. It's all the areas where you really want stuff to be spot on. Since our hi poly is not very detailed, this might not be that easy. Now, one issue I have found with ZAP is you won't be able to zoom out if your object is all the way zoomed if it's covering the screen. Because if it's all the way zoomed in, Alt clicking and dragging one Work can find a little corner of your screen and drag there. I think what you can also do is hit F, if that happens to fit to view. Now, make sure when you're working with symmetry that you don't accidentally swap sides and then go back to the other side and not repeat that. It's very easy to get confused. Especially when you're working down the middle, maybe you put two points here and then put two points there and then on the other side, you'll forget to do that and you'll just do this and that'll be a mess when you actually start to wrap it. Now, this mesh has a mouth bag, I think, so we might have some funny issues with that when it Z wraps. You should probably delete, if you're sculpting something without a mouth bag or in general, delete the mouth bag before you start Z wrap or detach it and then reattach it if you're going to use it. But I think this will be fine for demonstration. Now, if you have a face with really pronounced creases, then you'll want to follow them and put your points along that crease and do the same on your low poly to make sure you, you know, align your topology to those creases. But on a sort of smoother face like this, it's not too much of an issue. So around this many points usually works fine for me. I'll just save over these old ones. But if you're doing several different parts, and obviously, don't do that, save separate ones for each part you're Z wrapping. I can head on to wrapping. Yeah. So you can see this one's taking more time because our high poly is higher poly. So if you have a really high poly high poly, you'll want to decimate it probably just so this process doesn't take so long. But I think here I have around 100 k points, and it's still working fast enough for me. You can see the mouth bag is freaking out here. So, yeah, you want to remember to delete mouth bags. But I forgot, it'll be okay. You'll still get the idea, I think. I'm going to skip ahead to when this is done and we can take a look at the result. Okay, just finished. As you can see, the muff baad mag is bad because there were no points there and there is no uf Bag, but hopefully everything else will be okay. Now you see around the eyelids, we got some rough stuff going on. That's because we didn't really have proper eyelids because of the decimation. But I think I still showed you where the points go. Okay, let's fix this mess. Let me turn off the texture for now. It looks like we don't have poly groups. I guess I'll show you how to get rid of the mouth bag. I'm using Zimoa to do this. And there we go. Um, so you get the idea. I delete a little bit too much for the mouth, but you can see that it's done a pretty good job of aligning our low poly to that decimated mesh. And we can go through and smooth out the areas where it's sort of pinched or dragged the topology out too much. Um, like that. You can see it did a really good job with the ear and like I showed before, you can just reproject some details that you smoothed out. Now, of course, our hypolyn't have proper eyelids because it was decimated and really low resolution. This is just demonstration. But I think you get the idea on how to do it for a head with your own base mesh, if that's something you need to do. And that's sort of a demonstration of Z wrap. So I use it for re topo. If I have a good base mesh that I can wrap to my high poly, I use it while I'm sculpting as well, so I can move out of dynamesh. And, you know, of course, you can always just use ZR mesher. But sometimes Z mash doesn't give you the best result, or maybe you just want you just want to sculpt on your final topology because I can just subdivide this, do all the sculpting on it, and then I can actually bake in Zbrush from the highest subdivision level to the lowest. And I don't need to use an external baking software. And it's also sort of like one of the best ways to bake, if you can. This doesn't work for every single type of mesh because it's only really for the head or hands where you can subdivide your low poly and get a good sculpting topology out of it. You know, if a hard surf is stuff, your low poly is not going to be like that. That's not going to be even quads for a game resolution low poly. Then somewhere under render, I think you can render your normal maps out, cavity and AO map out. And what it'll do, it'll bake from the highest subdivision level to the lowest. Let me just see where that is. Right, it's probably here, I think. Let me just look it up so I can quickly. So to big maps, you use the multimap exporter, and, you can get a displacement, a vector displacement, a normal map. You can export your polyponts as textures, amine inclusion, all of these, pick a resolution. It's all really easy. And you'll never have issues with the BC like issues with the cage and stuff like that because it bags from the highest subdivision to the lowest. So that's really good for faces, or where you can use it. But you can't always. So it's usually just the head or the hands that are applicable. So yeah, I highly recommend Z RAP. I think they have a demo. I'm not sure. So get it if you can. It's really with the amount of time it saves, I think it's worth the money. I can't remember how much it costs right now. It's been ages since I got it. So yeah, check out ZAP. And also, I'll be showing all of this, how to do all of this straight in three DS MAX if you don't have Z RAP. So yeah, it's a little bit slower, but you can also do this in three DSMx if you don't want ZRAP. Okay, that's all I have for this demo. I hope it's been helpful for anyone that wants to try Z RAP. And 41. 01 Low Poly Material Setup: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Chapter one of UV mapping and baking. So the UV mapping and baking chapters are going to be numbered separately to the Rtpology chapters and to the texturing chapters that are going to come next. The reason why I've split things up like this is just so it's a little bit easier to find everything. Everything's in smaller chunks that you can sort through more easily. Now, UV mapping is lumped in with baking because there is a little bit of back and forth between baking and maybe adjusting your UV map slightly according to what comes out of the bake. Now, you don't always have to do this. Sometimes you get it right the first time, but it's pretty common to go back and adjust your UV maps. You know, it's not entirely a linear process. Sometimes you just have to see what the results are of the bake and maybe adjust your UV map a little bit or your smoothing groups. It's all just part of the process. So I'm going to start this chap off with a little bit of an overview of the low poly we have done already. So here it is. You'll notice that there is no hair because the reason why is hair is usually something I do last, and firstly, because you kind of want to get your textures in roughly so you can match up your hair a little bit with them. That's not essential. Maybe that's just my personal preference. But the main reason is you really need to set up your rendering scene when you're doing hair because you're going to be going back and forth between your three D program and whatever you're rendering in because your three D program will not be displaying the hair cards correctly at all. It's hair cards and hair is very shade dependent. And the only way you're going to have an accurate view of what your final hair looks like is in whatever engine you're rendering in. So basically, you need to have your scene pretty much roughly set up or at least somewhat of a decent lighting setup done just so you can preview what your hair will look like. So that's why it's typically something I do last. The other reason is you need to make textures for your hair cards, and well, you only place your hair once you've already rendered and made textures for it. So it's really something that comes last, at least in my workflow. I like to do it last, and I'm going to be using, you know, the mesh hair, the sculpted hair from Zbrush as a placeholder, so I can sort of still see what the character will look like with hair without having to make all of the haircuts just yet. The other thing you'll notice is no eyeballs. We didn't do any retopo for the eyeballs. Now, we are going to have to do a little bit of topology work for the eyeballs. We are going to have to make a low poly of them. It won't really be much lower poly than the actual ones we got from Zbrush, really. But the reason why I haven't done anything for the eyeballs as well is because there's a very specific setup you need to have your eyes look nice. You need to set up lines, meshes for the tear lines, and a little bit of a mesh for ambient occlusion over the eye. And that's something you can only really tell is working properly once you have at least a rough skin shade setup. So what I'm going to do is use the original eyes from Z rush as a bit of a placeholder while I get the bakes done and at least a rough texture pass on the face done. And then I'm going to handle everything relating to the eyes all in one go. So it's going to be modeling, UV mapping, and the texturing of the eyes are going to be in their own little segment because all of those things are very much related. I feel like if I show you the modeling of the eyes separately in the re topology chapter, and then, a dozen chapters later, I show you how it's textured. You won't really get the connection between why we made those meshes and how we're texturing them. Because there's a few measures that maybe if you're not familiar with making eyes that won't really make sense to you unless I show you the accompanying textures and shaders that go with them, like the tear line that sort of goes around the boundary between the eyeball and the eyelid and the ambient occlusion sort of plane that will sort of help add a little bit of a shadow to the eyeball. If I just show you the models of those, it might just be really confusing why I'm doing that. So all of the eyeball stuff is going to be lumped in in one chunk together, but in the meantime, I will be using the placeholder for zebush just so I can see the actual eyes with the shape and everything. So that's going to come once I have at least a rough texture pass on the face. Next up, make sure you've done the retopo for everything. Make sure you don't collapse down any of the instanced messes you have. So the way you can tell something is an instance is this little thing will be highlighted. If it's not an instance, it won't be highlighted at all. And you can click this button to make something unique. Also, instances will stop being instances if you attach them to anything, of course. So make sure you don't accidentally attach things to each other that are meant to be instances. That means, you know, this pouch needs to stay an instance, and I need to make sure not to attach it to anything else. And all these bolts, I need to make sure not to touch. Take a good look at your topology. It has to be more or less done. You can make minor adjustments to your topology after you've done your UVs. It will affect the UVs. It might break them a little bit. So after you've changed something in your topology, you might have to go back into the UV modifier and make some adjustments. Maybe some vertices will be stuck to each other in the UVU map. Maybe something will be in the wrong place after you've made a change to the topology, but usually minor changes to topology only cause minor changes in the UI map, and it's easy enough to just use a relax tool to fix them most of the time. Uh, so you don't have to be 100% sure on your topology, but it does have to basically be finished in your opinion at the time. If at a later point you decide that maybe it's not finished, then you can go back and change it, but it's not ideal. Ideally, everything is finished now, and, you know, you're pretty confident that all these messes are good. But, do remember that you can change things if you really need to. So you've got all your meshes retopped. You've got your instances that you're making sure not to make unique or, you know, make sure you're keeping your instances instances. And, you know, that's about it. So the first thing I'm going to start UV mapping the UV mapping process with is splitting my model up into different material sets. So to quickly explain why we need to split this model up into different materials and what that does, I'll open up a different project of mine where I've got a few different materials set up and a little scene in substance painter to sort of show you how that's going to affect the workflow later on. So you can see this texture set list. Basically, every different material you have on your mesh when you export it and import it into substance painter or marmoset will become a different texture set. So here I have a texture set for the cloth, and for the curas, it takes a moment to load in and a bunch of other different things. So already, that's one of the reasons why we split up objects into different materials. And that is, so we don't have to have all of our UVs in one giant UV set. This makes it a little bit easier to work. For example, in substance painter, at least, I can isolate things and, you know, see what I'm working on a little bit easier. And it means that you don't need such a large texture for every single object. For example, for a whole character, these days, you would probably need a four k texture to get all of the detail you need in. Whereas if you split it up into smaller chunks, you can more efficiently utilize that texture space. So that's another reason. But the main reason is so you can have different properties applied to different parts of your mesh. And material properties basically stuff like subsurface scattering for skin and use. Maybe some fronel for cloth and stuff like that, metalness, translucency. Basically, you can pretty much only apply these effects to an entire material, and you can mask the effect in and out. For example, with translucency, you can use a mask to mask in some translucency and mask some out. But some of these features or material properties are just incompatible with each other. For example, most of the time you can't have subsurface scattering with translucency or metallic. It depends on the engine you're working in, of course. Each one will have a different way of handling shaders. But typically, you can't just have all of the different materials you want, all the different materials you want in one giant texture set and then mask in what you don't and do want. That's just not how it works. You pretty much just have to split up similar materials or similar surfaces into separate materials and then apply those properties to those materials separately instead of having everything in one big chunk. So that's basically how we need to split up our object into different materials. So I'll probably want a material for the parts at our skin, and I'll probably want a material that is for parts at our cloth, and then a material for all these mechanical parts. And then maybe a separate material for these accessories and stuff like that. That's probably at the very least. I might split off the boots into their own material or maybe the boots and the gloves into their own material. It really can depend. One thing I have to make sure is that I have enough resolution for every single material set. So basically, you generally want to have the same text or density across your whole model. I will be showing how to set up a material that can easily illustrate textil density for you really soon. But in short, textil density is pixels per square area. Often it's measured in square meters on a character, maybe square meters is a bit big. But basically, And what I mean by pixels is pixels on the texture sheet. But in short, it basically means you don't want areas to look low res compared to other areas. So if I give this glove a four K texture, and the rest of the clothes only a 2048 texture, the rest of the clothes are going to be noticeably lower resolution than these really high resolution four K gloves. So generally, you just want to make sure that everything looks to be a similar resolution across your character. Of course, for the face, sometimes you give it a little bit of a higher resolution just because it's a focal point and a blurry face looks really bad. A blurry face looks much worse than a blurry shirt or something like that. There are little exceptions like that, but in general, we want everything to be the same resolution visibly, that's another thing to look out for when I'm splitting up objects into texture sets or materials. If I have a material with a lot of surface area in the UVs, for example, if I put all of the cloth stuff into one material, then it will have a lot more surface area than just these mechanical parts. Now, I can eva give the cloth parts, the cloth material set twice as large of a resolution. So I can use maybe a four K texture for all of the cloth stuff, and then a 2048 texture for the mechanical stuff. Like these parts, and maybe that will help even out the textil density, or I can try splitting up all of the cloth stuff into two different parts and maybe that will help even out the textil density. That's pretty case dependent. Sometimes you want to have more materials. Sometimes it's okay to just use a higher resolution. On a personal project, it doesn't really matter all that much because, um the performance isn't super important. Either way, you're going to be able to render one character on screen or not working on an actual video game, but it is something to keep in mind. So I'm going to start setting these materials up. Now, we already have three here or rather four, so we can just use these. But, if maybe you only used one material for the whole time, the way to make a new material is just to click on or drag a physical material out, and these are the ones I'm going to be using. You can probably use the other ones. It doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is applying a different material, and that's enough to tell the software that's a separate material on import. Whether it's substance painter or marmosett. I'm going to shrink these down a bit so they don't take up as much space. There is a different material editor. The default material editor. I think this can be a little bit confusing for beginners even myself. I just haven't gotten used to using it, so I use the slate material editor. Even though for these purposes, it's a little bit overkill. This is more for building out a more complex node based material. I just find this one easy to understand and easy to see everything. And I think especially beginners are going to find this easiest. Um, so, yeah, that's how you add an extra material. Now, when I was starting out, I was taught to plug all of my different materials into a multi sub object material. And maybe this is something you've heard of as well. Essentially, it just you can apply this. Let me use maybe the pants as an example here. So instead of applying these materials individually, I have applied the multi sub object material. You can see that nothing's changed, but that's because I haven't assigned any material IDs to it. If you go down to the polygon material IDs tab, you can change the set ID, and you can see the material is changed on the selected polygon. So you can use this as well. Um I only use this when I need to make some sub object material changes. In general, I don't really like the multi sub object material thing because it sort of doesn't really work with undos I found. If I apply a material and then undo, it just I guess it just isn't held in the undo cache at all or something like that. So I really find it annoying to work with. Sover I can, I just like to plug in the materials I want out. And if I don't need to use sub object materials at all, then I just avoid using them entirely because I do find them a little bit annoying. And on export, it doesn't actually make any difference, really. So it's best to color code your materials in such a way to make it easy to understand what you're looking at. So I'm going to make the one for skin pink. And I'm going to name it appropriately. This name that you see here is what your material or texture set will be named when you import into substance painter. So for now, the parts I want to be skin are already select. I already have that material applied, just because all I did was change the color of an existing material, and that was the one that was applied. Next up, I will make one for cloth or just rename one of my materials for cloth. And, you know, it's just dragon drop onto your selection and then use the assigned to selection option. I seem to have two parts for the collar. Right. Another thing I should do before we continue is to clean up my scene and get rid of all the high poly objects. This is something I forgot to do, but it's basically probably a good idea to save a copy of your scene. So leave all of your retpofils as they are. Um probably name your Rtpofle something that you'll be able to understand because I like to save iterations, so I'll have retopo one, Retopo two, just so I can go back and forth in case I've messed something up, or maybe I remember that maybe I did something better earlier and then changed it later. I like to keep a couple of iterations as I'm working, and then probably name the last one something you can identify easily. So you know that this is the final good result. And then you'll probably want to save a copy when you're starting your UVs so you don't mess up your topo or that, you know, you can always go back to your original Rtopo file. So I'm going to name this one UV unwrap. Now, when I was recording this, I did say to delete all of the hi poly meshes because you wouldn't be needing them anymore. And then exactly like a few hours later, I ended up reimporting them because you do need to have the high polymshes there so you can reference a few things when you're marking your UV seams. Stuff like where the seams are on pieces of fabric. You generally want your UV seams to follow that. And while you do have edge loops following those seams on the fabric, once you get rid of the high poly, you can't really tell which edge loop is meant to be the one that goes along the seams on the high poly. So while I do suggest you definitely go through and clean up your file and get rid of anything you don't need and get rid of any duplicate hi poly objects. Don't do what I'm doing here, which is deleting all of your hi poly objects. You do need to keep at least the ones for the cloth parts. But in general, I would suggest keeping them, just getting rid of any duplicates and cleaning up your file a little bit just so all the hypolyobjects are in one layer or in one place so you can easily hide them or go back to them if you need them. So do a little bit of cleanup on your file, but don't get rid of all of your hipoolobjects, like I did here because you do end up needing them a little bit later just so you can mark out your UV seams. Okay, so that's my file cleaned up a bit. I can go back to applying my materials. So let me set up the or material or I'll call it hard surface. And I'll make it gray or metal. And I will make it metallic in the viewport. These aren't really PBR materials in the three dS Max viewport, so they don't actually represent very correctly. The metalness value doesn't do a whole lot. But still, it's better than nothing. So I'm going to apply this to all of the sort of mechanical parts that I have. And this is probably everything, as far as I can see. Another thing is I have two of these cloth pieces, and I'm pretty sure this is the old one because it doesn't have these eyelps so I can get rid of it. Now, if you're wondering why the wireframes are different on some of these objects, the wireframe color is a separate option. If you click on the object and go over here, you can change your object color, which will change the color of its wireframe. So you can use that to sort of better split up your different objects and make them easier to see in wireframe view, even though they have the same material applied. I don't really need to use this much in this case because I sort of know what's going on here. So these gloves definitely shouldn't have a skin material applied to them. Um, Although, like I said, the way I'm probably going to want to split this up, and this is good practice is to not have if you can, if you have a lot of cloth parts or in general, lots of surfaces that don't have any metallic parts in them. You know, you can try and have a texture set with no metalness map. So in that case, you know, you save one texture sheet from that material. And that's typically a good idea when it comes to game assets, is if you can save one extra texture sheet, that's quite a good saving because textures are actually the heaviest part of a model in terms of storage space, in terms of video ram usage. A large texture is way bigger than even 100,000 triangle model. And that's because if you imagine every single pixel of a texture is an RG and B value. And every single vertex of a model is, you know, also similarly some sort of coordinate value. Of course, there's a single vertice weighs a little bit more than a pixel on a texture or significantly more because it's not just an XYZ coordinate. When it comes to characters, it's also storing skin data. So it's storing data on which bones have influence over that specific vertex. It's also storing a vertex normal. Uh, usually, and usually there's some other information in there as well, maybe vertex color, maybe something else completely different. Sometimes there's like a proprietary thing that's attached to a vertice specific to whatever engine or game the studio is working on. But even if you consider that a vertice way more is using up way more bytes than a individual pixel, if you do some quick maps on how many pixels there are in a single texture, so if you have a 1024 by 1024 texture, that's 2024 times 2000 or 11024 times 1024. That's a big number. I can't I don't know it off the top of my head. Let me check. So that's over 1 million pixels in a 1024 texture. 1024 is pretty small. You're not going to be using just 102-04-1024 texture on a AA character. It's closer to, you know, up to maybe a four k if you add up all of the different texture sets. And that's what I'm talking about in engine. When you're doing your own personal renders, every single texture can pretty much be a four K texture because you definitely don't want to be seeing any pixels in your renders. So when you're working on personal projects, just sort of cheat. Don't try and do things game resolution. Just use the highest resolution texture you have. When you're texturing in substance painter, also make all of your textures a higher resolution than you need, and then you can always downscale them. That's how studios work as well. That's why you can have a remaster after a few years because usually the studio will still have the source files which are offered at a higher resolution. Just because, you know, then you can always downscale something as needed. You can't upscale it if you realize that maybe something needs to be a high resolution. So always work at the highest resolution possible. And when you're making personal renders for something that's not an actual game, make them as high resolution as you can just so it looks good. So, yeah, this is why saving a single texture, even if it's a single grayscale texture can be pretty good. So if you can avoid needing a metalness mask or a metalness map in one of your materials, that's quite a good saving. So if I lump all of the cloth parts that definitely don't have any metallic details in them into one texture set, that means I can save an entire metalness map from the model. So if we take a look at some of our cloth details, you can see that these accessories, they have some metallic components to them. Now I could go ahead and split off all of these tiny metallic components off into their own material entirely, which in this case, might work because I've modeled them as separate objects. But in some cases, you might not have them model as a separate objects. So if they're merged with the surface of the object, you'll want to take that entire object and put it in its own texture set. For example, these little eye rings for the hoodie here, they are modeled into the surface, so I can't realistically take them and put them in their own material. I have to take this entire object. So what I might do to split up all of these cloth details because this is quite a large area, even a four k texture might start to show a little bit of pixelation up close. And exporting out an eight K texture from substance painter is a really big hassle on, you know, just most people's regular old PCs, right? I'll take a little bit too long to be fun to work with. So four K is basically the upper limit. I guess if you have a really new graphics card, exporting eight K textures won't really be a big deal. But in short, I'm going to be splitting off all of the cloth things into two separate textures. I'm going to try and keep one of them without any metalness or any metallic pots, so I can avoid having a metalness map for that chunk. And then the other parts will have a metal ness map with them for any metallic details that might be in there. So that's how I'm going to split up my cloth. So in that case, I will need another cloth material. Or maybe I'll just call it accessories. And maybe I will make the cloth kind of blue. And the accessories, maybe just a lighter blue colour, something like that. And I'll put them on top of each other so they're easy to see. So let me start selecting my accessory objects. And earrings and all the other little metal parts I'm going to have as accessories as well, as well as these pouches. Basically, anything that's not on the main body is going to be an accessory and also anything that has a metallic component to it. I will put in the accessories, as well as this belt because we already have a lot of belts in here. Oops. And these strings on the pants I'll put in there as well. And I'll put this in with the rest of the glove. This is a rough base of what my different textures are going to be. Again, this doesn't have to be final. I can't really be sure that this is going to be the final way these materials are split up until I see how the UVs turn out, what the texal density turns out to be, because I might have to split them up or do something about them in terms of, you know, getting the texal density to match. Now that I'm looking at it, this part may be troublesome to bake if it's in the same material, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, this will do, and I want to move on to making a quick test UV map, basically doing a very quick UV map, very quickly applying seams to our model and then doing an autopack and not really trying to straighten out any of the UVs properly. So just something really quick so that I can get it into Mam set Tool Bank and just click Bake and see what it looks like, and then finally see this model in real time in our rendering engine. So it looks like I missed a few things here when applying my materials. Okay. I'm going to end this chapter here. So all I've done in this chapter really is cleaned up the file a little bit and split up the low poly into separate materials. And in the next chapter, what I'll be doing is a quick Rf UV map, just so I can get the model into Mama set Tolbag and do a quick test pick. So that's all for this one. Thanks for watching. 42. 02 Base Unwrapping Part1: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Chapter two of the UV Mapping. In this chapter, we will actually be doing some UV mapping finally. So let's get right into it. So before we start, I will suggest to install a plug in for UV mapping called text tools. It's a really popular TDS Max plugin when it comes to UE mapping, especially among artists that do real time assets. Now, I find it's a little bit more useful when it comes to the hard surface stuff. I tend to use The DS Max as native tools for all of the more organic parts of the body. I just like the way seam marking works for those areas with TDS Max's tool, but there are a few hard surface parts on this character, so this is definitely still going to come in handy, and in general, it's a nice tool to have a nice plug in, and it's completely free, so basically no reason not to download it. So just scroll down to the bottom of the script site script spot page for this. You can find it easily look up three Text tools, three Max in Google, and you'll definitely find it. And once you've downloaded the file, just find it in wherever you download it to and drag it into your viewpot. And that will show you a little installer. Quick install will work fine for our purposes. Don't need to do anything more advanced there. And as soon as you install it, you'll see the text tool, little window show up with all of these buttons right there. So you may have accidentally or on purpose closed the little window that opens up when you install text tools, and now you're wondering how to get it back. So a good idea to have is to set up a little GUI button like one of these so that you can always click it and bring back the text Tools tab whenever you want it. So to do that, you want to go to customize and customize user interface. And when you open that by default, it will probably be set. It will probably be in the Mouse tab or something like that, and you'll want to go through tool bars, and the category will be set to all commands. The group you want is main UI. And under category, you want to scroll down all the way till you find text tools. Now for some other plugins, I've found that in the category tab, they are named differently to the actual name of the plugin. Often the author likes to have their name in the categories tab because that lets them group all of their plugins under one category in your plugins list. So you do need to check the documentation for what it's going to be called in the categories tab. But for textals it's nice and simple and it's just called textals. And what I'll do is I'll just drag this button to somewhere on the UI. Now, sometimes it won't let you place it where you want it. Like, for example, here, for some reason, it doesn't want me to put it here. Who knows why? But you can usually put it somewhere like here. Now, if you now you can see I press that button and my window pops back up. If you don't want this button anymore, you can just right click on it and hit Delete button. So moving on to the actual unwrap. What I like to do is attach all of the objects in one material to each other because that way they will all show up together in the UVW modifier. You can apply a modifier to several objects at once without attaching them to each other. But let me just show that happening right here. You can see that the UVW modifier has been applied to all of these objects at once, and if I open it up, you can see that they are all here. Even though these are still separate objects, you can see the UV unwrapped modifier has been applied to all of them, but they are still separate objects. And that's why this modifier is incursive because it is sort of attached across multiple objects. But I tend not to do this because it kind of messes up your modifier stack a little bit. Even though this is applied to multiple objects, you know, I can't edit the editable poly below it because that will break the unwrap UVW modifier above it. And in general, there's no real benefit to attaching it to multiple objects when instead, you could just attach those objects to each other. So I'm going to undo and just attach all of these objects to each other. And what you can do is attach even across different materials, so I could attach all of the objects of the low poly to each other. But, you know, that makes a lot of clutter and it makes you have to sort through more things than you really need to. I will tend to do that last once I've done all of my UV maps for the separate parts. Now, in the UV editor, you can isolate your different UV groups or your different materials. So you can look at one material at a time in the UV editor. But again, I don't find that really necessary. I'll just work on one material at a time, and then at the end, I can attach all the things together all in one go. There's no need to do it now. So I'll just be attaching all of the materials of the body right now, and this is what I'm going to be working on. Now, you can add your Unwrap UVW modifier through the modifier list, or you can just click this button in the text towards plugin, and that will do the same thing. But if you are using the text tool shortcut, keep in mind that select by planar angle will be turned on by default. So if I try to select one face right now, you can see it's actually selecting a bunch of them. It's basically selecting all of the faces within 20 degrees of that face. When you click on a Face, and that's not really useful on a model like this. So I'm going to turn that off. Normally, I have my UV editor on a different screen, so I would move it off screen onto my other monitor. But in this case, I need to show you guys everything I'm doing. So it's going to be maybe slightly more messy than I would typically have my menus and UIs set up. So the first thing to do is probably get all these UVs scaled down so that I can actually see how they fit into an island, and it's a little bit more convenient that way. So that's what you usually arrange elements little tab for, and just click Pack custom with all of the UV selected, and it will pack them all into one UV island. For real time use, you generally want all of your UVs packed into one island. You can have them outside the island if you have tiling textures or, you know, for convenience, you can sometimes leave things outside of the main island, but usually it's best to keep it all in one. So these islands actually tile infinitely in all directions. So if, for example, you had one part over here, and if you imported it into an engine, this part would still be textured with whatever texture is in this location because you just tile over and over in most game engines. At least that's how it is in Unreal and marmoset. I don't know too much about the other ones. I know it's the same in unity as well. But in general, we want everything to be in one UV island. So what I'm going to be doing now is a very quick unwrap. I won't be doing more advanced stuff like straightening out the UVs and making it perfect and also, manually packing the UVs to ensure that space is utilized as well as possible and also set up well for timing textures. All I'm going to be doing is putting in some seams, doing some quick peels, and just throwing together a quick UVW unwrap so I can put everything into Mam set tool bag and do a quick test bake and see how the model looks in Mam set Tolbag. So let's get right ahead with that. Now, I already did a little bit of testing on this part, and I did place one UVsum here. So just to restore this part to default, I will just do a quick planar map on. Just to make it closer to what you would see if you just apply this modifier yourself without any other changes. So what planar mapping does is just projects from whichever view you have selected. I don't use this too much on organic acids, but it definitely has its uses. So basically, planar mapping just squashes everything down into one view. You can select an axis to a line along, and you will actually see the plane it's being aligned to right here. And you can also do a view align so it aligns to your camera and there's a few other options. And there's also a few different other mapping modes. Still in cylindrical mapping is quite good on tubes and pipes and stuff like that, but this isn't all that useful for a character. I'm just doing this to set the UVs to something like what they would be by default. If you just opened this up. Oops If you just apply the unwrapped UVW modify in the first place. So the way I like to unwrap cloth is mainly using the peel tools and the seams tools. And I'm just going to be really quick here. And later on, I will be going more in depth on how to sort of perfect these UVs and make them really good. But for now, we're just going to be doing a quick peel mostly. And marking out the main seams of this low poly. So using the point to point seems tool, I can just mark out seam from point to point. And essentially the tool will path the shortest distance between the next point you have selected, so you need to watch that orange line and make sure it's going where you want it. And I'm going to be marking these seams along the seams of the cloth, basically. And this is why it was important to place seams along the seams in the high poly. To make sure that I had an edge loop going down those seams in the low poly as well, like I have one here. So to make a point to point selection, you just click once with the left bow button and then click again to select your next point and right click to exit that mode, and then right click again to exit the tool entirely. If you make some seams accidentally in the wrong spot, you can use the Edit SEMs tool and Alt drag to sort of unmark all of those seams. And you can also use this tool to make selections one by one. Also, you can just use the default edge selection tools and then convert edge selection to SEMs. And those are the basic seam marking tools. There's nothing more advanced there. You need to make sure your seams go all the way around, otherwise you will sort of you know, it won't unwrap the way you expect because if there's a part linking, you know, the unwrapper or the peel tool won't be able to sort of split your model apart properly if, you know, some parts are still connected. So I've marked out this one seam. And this should now let's see how it looks once it's peeled with a quick peel. So this button expands your selection to all of the seams. So if you have an area enclosed by seams, then it will only expand to that enclosed area. In this case, I only have one seam running down the model. So all the parts are still connected of this low poly object. So if I expand the polygon selection, it will actually select the whole object. Now I'm going to click Quick Peel. And you can see it's peeled this part, and it's actually done a pretty good job. This is more or less straight, and it's pretty much what I want to see. Now, I probably would want to have another seam running down where this seam on the cloves is. But for now, I'm going to leave it as is, and we'll go through and refine this a little bit more later. This is pretty adequate for getting a decent bake, but it's not very professional. On a more professional bake. You want basically these external edge loops or edges of your islands to be pretty much straight, and you also want different parts to be split off so that in substance painter, you can apply tying textures quite easily to those areas and do the same in engine. So generally, you want to split your UV islands up by material if you can. That's for modern assets. But this is perfectly good for a test BC. Next up, another easy area to handle is probably going to be this staff. So the shortcuts for selection modes are a little bit different in UV unwrap mode. In Edit Poly, there's obviously five different selection modes from vertex, edge, then there's whole selection, and then there's face selection, and there's element selection, I believe. In this case, there's only three, so the shortcuts have also changed. You might be clicking four bunch of times to get into polygon selection mode and realize it's not doing anything. That's because in Edit Poly, the shortcut for that is three. So I'm going to go into Edge selection mode and just select this entire edge loop. That runs down the outside of the scarf. Now, I could put the seam on this central edge, but I feel like if I put it on one of the more internal ones, it will be a tiny bit less visible, and that might be slightly better. So now that I've made the selection, I can just convert edge selection to seams. And now going to face mode with the three button. And if I use expand polygon selection to seams, you can see it's only expanded to the area marked off by Seams. And now I can quick peel and here's my peeled out part and do the same for the exterior. Okay. And you can just leave these stacked up on each other. And if you want to reorganize them, you can just click PAC Custom again. And if you tick the rotate button, it will rotate them around to fit them in as best as it can, but this tool isn't that smart. So it usually won't do a great job by itself. You will have to go in and sort of help it and pretty much do this manually. Now, the pants have a lot of seams on them. So we're going to have to spend some more time. And also, there is this part that's sort of getting in the way. Unfortunately, in Unwrap UVW mode, you don't have access to the ability to hide parts easily. So, you know, that's a little bit annoying. You know, you don't have that option that you would have had in Edit polymode. So that's a little bit unfortunate. So we're going to have to just do without. I know there is a seam that runs along the interior of this sort of cutting in the pants, so I can mark this one out. No problem. So let me just go around and mark it out. And I do need to pay attention to my point to point selection tool pathing correctly because it will always path the shortest distance, and sometimes the shortest distance is a little bit unexpected and, you know, I might not go exactly where you want it. So I can just select this area as well and quick peel it. And I'm just moving these off to the side so I can better see what's going on. You can just leave them to stack up on top of each other. It doesn't make a difference. Next up, another selection, doing the exact same thing on the other side. And let me peel this one as well. Now I'll peel this object. Again, I will put the seam on the underside, just so it's even less visible than it would be normally. And I'm going to have to use lt egg to see better. Now, if it's getting to a point where maybe some part is obscured so much that even going into this transparent mode doesn't really help you see what you need to do. You can freely just detach parts and then reattach them. Make sure that you detach them after you collapse or unwrap UVW modifier or add an edit poly on top. And also make sure you do those things after you've peeled or, you know, basically made use of all of your seam selections because every time you collapse or remove the Unwrap UVW modifier, any seam selections, which means any blue selections will disappear. They're only stored in the unwrapped UVW modifier. So if you lose the unwrapped UVW modifier for whatever reason, they will be gone, all of these blue seams. The green map seams, which are basically the seam selections that are now converted into map seams, which basically means the UV islands have been cut across those areas, they will stay, even if you collapse unwrapped UVW modifier. So you need to make sure that before you, you know, collapse the unwrap UVW modifier or add an edit poly on top and detach apart, you need to make sure that you have made use of all of your seam selections, so you've peeled or you know, converted those to actual map seams if you don't want them to disappear. In this case, I can still see what I'm doing. So I'm just going to carry on doing this. I don't really need to detach this part. It's just going to be a little bit annoying to see what I need to do. Again, I'm trying to go for the internal edge, which will be a lot less visible than the external one. And that should do unless I've missed something. And yeah, it looks like that worked, so I can just peel this and then select the internal one and peel it as well. And now moving on to the pants. Sometimes it can be easier to make your selections on the two D view than the three D one. In this case, when the model is like this still, it's probably not easier to do it that way. But once you have them flattened out like this, then maybe it is easier to do it in the two D view. You can use these tools in either view. So for this part, there is no visible seam on the cloth going upwards because this sort of fabric square gets in the way. So I'm just going to mark the seam along the bottom of the fabric, and then that sort of ends up going down straight into the front zipper of the pants. And I can just carry on marking the seam all the way through to the back. Now, as I'm putting these seams down, I am seeing a lot of little places in the model where I can perhaps somewhat improve the way where seams line up. Maybe I can add an edge to make the seams flow a little bit better. You may have spotted that around the zipper area. There's something going on that's maybe not quite ideal. So, you know, while I'm doing all of this stuff, I am sort of noticing things that I'm going to have to go and tweak. And, you know, this is why I say that it's not a linear process. There's going to be a lot of things that you're going to want to slightly tweak on your low poly when you're doing your UVs. You're going to notice maybe some edge floats that aren't quite ideal. And you should sort of go back and tweak those things definitely. So I can actually go ahead and detach this middle section. So I'm going to go into vertex selection mode and select the middle vertex and then Control three or actually Control click on the polygon selection mode. Control clicking doesn't work or control and using the shortcut doesn't work. You have to click on the icon to convert your selections. I'm also going to grow by one to select this entire cap for the body, and I'm just going to quick peel. And now for the body, it looks like I haven't made the selection all the way through here. For some reason, my peel seems turned green, so I had to take and untick these parts to get them to turn back to the color they're supposed to be. I'm sure that's just a visual little bug. So I'm just going to make sure my selection links up with the rest of the pants. You can see that it's definitely quite hard to see. This may be a case where it would be easier to select on the model, but it's not until I at least peel this part. Um, sorry, but it is a little bit tricky for me to see what's going on. But this should be fine now. Let's try it. Again, it hasn't worked. Maybe somewhere around the back, I haven't made my selection all the way through. And maybe it looks like it might be the case. So, yeah, areas like this you sort of have to pay a little bit of attention to. But sometimes it can be a struggle to find out where exactly you're going wrong. And in that case, just peel whatever you have. On a larger part, it will take a little bit longer, and you'll get something that looks probably a bit like this. And now you can determine where exactly your selection was wrong. In this case, it looks like actually my model was split apart into two parts. And for some reason, this tool was just selecting everything for no good reason. It might be related to an end goon or something like that. Those sort of trip this tool up a little bit. That's why it's a good idea. If you're struggling to find out where the selection is sort of leaking through your marked themes, you don't know where you have a gap in your marked themes, just go ahead and peel it, and then you can refine it a little bit later once you know what's going on. So once you have your appeals, even this can be hard to make sense of and sort of tell what's going on here, like which parts are what? So a way you can sort of understand which parts of your model are on the UV map, you can just make some small selections and see where things are. So in this case, you can see that everything's been shrunk to a really tiny hole, and that's because this is like a big tube, and there hasn't been there's nowhere for it to split along. So we have to sort of do a side seam now for these parts. Now, I know from memory that sine seam goes up here, but you probably will want to have your high poly handy. I mentioned this earlier that I accidentally deleted all of my high poly objects and then had to re import them later. So this is why you might want to keep your high poly around just so you can reference it and see where the seams on the fabric are. So, for example, here, I know that there's a seam here on the high poly. Because I can see it. But if I didn't have the high poly on hand, it would be hard to tell just from the low poly that this is where the seam is. So I'm going to go ahead and mark it now. And I need to do the same going upwards. And this seam sort of ends here. So I'm going to follow along with the pocket because the pocket is also a different kind of fabric, so it's kind of like a seam as well. And then I have this little detail here that I need to go around. And up here, this is probably one of those things I'm going to have to tweak. It doesn't really make sense that the seam is ending here for me. Let me see how it looks on the high poly. So I'm quite lucky this area is more or less hidden. But okay, I'm now realizing what's going on here. Sort of waist band comes in here. So it's a seam that goes this way along the model. Because I still need to break this model up into chunks on the U Map, I'm just going to cut across here, although I think there is a defined seam on the high polly of where the waistband ends. So it's just going to be something I'm going to have to check once I'm refining the model. I accidentally used the peel mapping button here or the pelt mapping button. Pelt mapping is useful and it's good, but it's not what I wanted to do now. I'm just going to do quick peels for now. So here's the result from that peel. You can see Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is, even though you can see the seams or the islands in the two debe, every single chunk of your UVs like this is called an island. Even oh you can see them in the two debe, it still doesn't really give you a good idea of how they affect the model and how they distort it. And the way to do that, do check that is to use AUV checker. Now, textols comes with AUV checker shortcut. But I don't really like the textols ones because it's just a flat, two color checker pattern, which isn't you the best idea of what's going on in your model, and also changes the material of the object. It's literally just a material applied to your object, and I prefer not to have my material changed just to check the UVs. Instead, the more recent versions of radius Max have a really great built in text checker. So just head on over to this drop down and you can use this text checker. Also, if you have maybe a pre made texture that you're unwrapping too for some reason, that's something common on older or stylized assets, you can pick a texture. So if you go to the pick texture option and scroll down to Bitmap, you can find it in your files and open it and apply it to your model. So with this texture checker enabled, it gives you a pretty good idea of the distortions and stuff on your model. And also with these letters, you can tell if a part is flipped, which is something that happens. So if I mirror this part, you can now see just because the letters are inverted that this part is mirrored, and sometimes that's not something that you want. Other times, it's okay. It also, you can easily see if a part is vertical or not. And in general, the letters give you a better idea of the sort of distortion that's going on and how acceptable it is. So with this, let me rotate it a little bit more So you can see that this area that I peeled already is still a much better result, and there's not too much major deformation going on here compared to the other leg, which I haven't fixed yet. You can see right here the sort of UVs are so tiny that it's all just one color in this area. Whereas this mostly has a grid across all of it, aside from at the bottom where stuff gets a little bit scrunched up down here. And I'm wondering why that is actually So in the two D view, you can just drag around individual points. If you go into the move selected sub object, you can just do this. And it looks like there aren't any real connections down there. So maybe this is just the peel tool acting funny. Let's just try another quick peel. And it looks like the result is a tiny bit better, but still not exactly what I want it to be. So in this case, maybe I can try a pelt map, which is slightly more advanced, and it just works slightly differently. It's not always better than peel or quick peel, but it does have a few more options. And basically, it has this ring or a stretcher around it, and it stretches all of your vertices out in that direction. So we can start the pelt. And once you've done your pelt, you can then start a relax. The pelt will sort of stretch everything out into a circle, and then the relax will sort of flatten things back out again. And you can see this took a little bit longer than a quick peel. But the result is quite a bit better. Everything's a lot more straight. So now I can go ahead and do this on the other leg, but I do need to mark out my side seam as well on the other leg. So on this leg, there is a cap on the bottom, which is something I forgot to do for the other one. So I'm just going to remove that. And you can see doing that sort of messed up the rest of the model a bit, so let me undo. And maybe instead, I will just Oh, it's a good idea to turn off detach and pack over here because sometimes they can mess with your UVs. You can see this time It's being a little bit uncooperative and not wanting to detach this part from my UV islands. What I might do is use brake or a Yeah, I'll use a break to detach this part. And really, the main issue why I'm getting these kind of errors here is because that part is squashed down, so tiny. So, you know, this entire area, all of these polygons are squashed down into this tiny area, and sometimes that can give you a few sort of issues like this when it comes to the other tools. Which is kind of why you want to do your unwrapping gradually, right? So now with that part selected, you can see it squashed down so tiny, you can't even see it on the UV in the UV editor window. But now, if I do a quick feel on it, okay, it's still not working, and I think I know why that is now. It's because this is a large ish engon and engons also mess with the UV editor like this. They don't always mess with it, but sometimes they do. So maybe this time I'll try a plainer map. And at that time, it worked quite well. So if I select a better angle for it, like the axis, it will come out perfectly good. So yeah, all those issues were probably because this cap was an end goon. Now, you might be a bit frustrated after you use a projection mode that you can't select anything. That's because you have to exit it by clicking the planum Map button again. So, yeah, all those issues I just had were probably because this is a big endgon. So you can sort of keep that in mind. Sometimes if you're having issues with the UV editor, it might be because you have a hidden endgon somewhere. So now back to marking out the seam. The bottom one is very easy and straightforward. And the top one on this side is also pretty easy because I only have to go so far. All the way up to here. Oh, now that I'm looking at this, I probably want to go along the bottom of this fabric square and cut out over there. And this should do for a quick unwrap. This is something that I'm going to have to split up more into better islands a little bit later on. Now, if you haven't marked out a seam, for example, I haven't got a seam marked down here. So if I use the expand polygon selection to SMs, it will select this bottom area as well, which is definitely something I don't want. Instead, I can just turn on elements selection and just select the entire island either in the two D view or if I do the same thing for here in the three D view, I can do that for. Actually, I can't do that in the three D view. You can only select islands in the two D view. Never mind that. So now I'm going to hit Quick Peel. And it's not being so quick because this is quite a large part. And you can see, again, this result isn't ideal, just like we had before. So instead, I'm going to use a pelt map, and I'm going to start the pelt. And once it's stretched roughly into this circle, at that point, the relax will probably work quite well. So you don't have to wait for it to stop moving completely, wait for it to roughly get into a reasonable circle shape, and then you can start relaxing. And that's pretty much it for the quick unwrap of the body. Now I can go ahead and pack it. And this is good enough for a test, right? If I bake something like this, it will probably look fine, although I do have some very obvious issues going on over here, so maybe this is something I'll want to take a look at. Basically, for a quick bake, what I look out for is just for everything to be a nice even grid. I'm not worrying too much about the angles here. I'm not worrying about UV lands being straight, which are both important things, but they're not important for a test. The test is basically, so I can have my scene set up in MamzTolbag and I can start to iterate upon the UVs. So again, I'm just trying to be quick here. I only want to spend an hour or two on all of these UVs for the quick test. So for this area, I want to find a way to split this whole thing off. That will make sense and maybe improve the UVs in that area a little bit. So what I'm going to do is just carry on marking up the seam around this, you know, the top square, the top half of the fabric, you know, overlap thing that I made before. And, I mean, it might be hard to tell for a viewer, what exactly I'm marking here. I sort of remember this edge, so I sort of have an idea of what I'm marking here even though I can't even though I can't really see it clearly, um, but it's just the bottom edge of this sort of top half of the fabric square. And I'm going to go ahead and quick peel it separately. And you can see those UVs are fixed now. So yeah, this is a good enough quick UV bake. And this packing job is pretty bad, if I am honest. Again, there's a little issue here, but let's see where it is if it's in a key area. Okay, this is probably an area where I want it to be quite good. So maybe another little trick I will show you guys is doing partial unfolds. So I'm going to select this whole edge loop and detach this area. Just using the brake button. And then I can do a quick peel on this area. And then, because I don't really want a seam here, what I can do is select this bottom edge again and click the Stitch custom button and it will sort of stitch it back on. And that's something I'll be using a lot more later on when I'm refining the UVs, but in this case, it was also a good idea to make a quick fix on that part. And yeah, so these UVs are good enough to go for the test. Let me just wait for that Auto safe to stop and repack these just to see if we can maybe get a slightly better pack. This is probably as good as it's getting. One of the reasons why all of these islands are so small and not really utilizing this space properly is because they're all rotated in the wrong directions. And honestly, I'm not sure what the rotate toggle does here. I don't find that it's ever really all that helpful, but this is good enough for now. So that's going to be it for this chapter just because we are coming up to the length of a chapter. So I've done the UVs for the base body. In the next chapter, I'll be doing the UVs for all the rest of the parts. And again, they'll be really quick and just really quick and dirty just so I can get this all into Mamast. So thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. 43. 03 Base Unwrapping Part2: Welcome to Chapter three of UV mapping and baking. So in this chapter, I'm hopefully going to be finishing up the quick UV map for all of the remaining parts. So I'm going to work on the sort of accessories material now. And I want to make sure not to attach any of the instance parts together because if I do that, then I will lose the sort of instancing, and those objects will become unique. So I'm going to hide the pouches, and I'm going to hide all of the little buckles from the shoes. And the rest of these parts are unique. I suppose, things like the ends of these hoodie jawstrings I could instance, but something like this will literally take under a minute to unwrap. I might want to instance the earrings, but, you know, I'll just duplicate one of these and move it over after I've done the unwrap. Uh, so I'm not going. I think everything I have here are unique objects that I don't really want to instance, so I can go ahead and freely attach all of them together. And, you know, if I do realize that I'm messed up somewhere, I still have that older file that I saved before I started unwrapping, and I can just import anything I need from there. And when you import files from three Max to three Max, well, there's like a merge file function. You keep the modifier stack and, you know, any sort of instancing there might be there, so you don't lose anything that way. So I'm not too worried about accidentally attaching something that I shouldn't have and stuff like that, in this case. So yeah, nothing to worry about there. Okay, I think that's all of the parts attached to each other. This does not look like the low poly I made. Not sure what's going on here. I'm pretty sure I retop this better. For now, I'm just going to hide this and see what's going on there a little bit later. Mm hmm. Okay, that's all of our parts, I think. So now I can add the Unwrap UVW modifier. Again, I can use the texts button or I can go into the modifier list. It doesn't really make a difference. That shortcut isn't all that fast, but, you know, it is something that's there if you'd like to use it. I'm just going to select everything and make sure I turn on ignore back facing. It looks like I missed a part when I was attaching. Now, we should be set. Now I can add the unwrapped UV D modifier. Select everything and pack it just to get it all at the right scale. Now, you may notice in some cases when you're packing that it is taking a really long time, and this might actually be an issue where you have an island that is so stretched out to such a ridiculous extent that the packing algorithm can't actually figure out how to pack that object into a single island just because it's so huge compared to all the other objects, and you may end up with three SPACs just not responding, which is, I'm pretty sure exactly what happened here. You can see that the screen definitely isn't meant to look like this. So that's something to look out for. And that's something to know if you're having this issue, that might be what happened. So you may want to save before you pack. If you do get a crash like this, go into your autosave folder and find the most recent Auto save. And that's what I'm going to do now, and I'll show you what to do in this sort of case in order to still have a way to sort out your UV islands a little bit better. Okay, so I've recovered my file from the auto save because when I tried that thing with paking the UVs, it just pretty much crashed through S MAX. And I'm going to go into a little bit of detail and explain why. You can see that one of these UV islands is just huge, and no matter how much I zoom out, it just keeps on going. And I have no idea how big this is, but clearly the packing algorithm couldn't figure out how to pack something this big in with all of these other parts. So that's why it crashed, and you do need to be careful with stuff like this because like you saw, if I just carelessly clicked Pack on everything that crashed through the SMAx. So in order to sort this out and make it actually usable and not crash through SMAx whenever I try to do something with it, I'm just going to go ahead and give it a planer map. I'm pretty sure the planer map is one of the least resource intensive ways to map a part. So it's a pretty safe bet for when the UVs are all messed up like this. So I'm just going to click Planer Map, and you can see that this boot is looking a lot better. And now let me do the same for the other one. And that issue is fixed, and we should be able to easily pack everything together now without any issues. So if I just click Back custom, and wait for the auto save to complete. Looks like this still has some odd shape in. So let me select this island. Now, the reason why these are popping up, why I have these really extremely large and sort of misshapen islands is just while you're modeling and welding stuff together and bridging stuff and all that sort of stuff, it all ends up distorting the UVs. So let me click plan a map on that. In fact, you know what I can do to just nip all of these problems in the bud is just go ahead and plan and map everything. And now there definitely won't be any issues. So if I click Pack again, I see definitely no issues now. Everything is the right size and nothing is making three S Max crash for me. So that can be a pretty good idea. If you open up your unwrapped UVW modifier for the first time and you're seeing these islands that are way too huge and oddly misshaped, it's pretty good bit to just select everything and do a planer map. There's also a few modifiers. So some of these UVW mapping modifiers, let me just do this one. Have all of these options in them without having to go into the UV editor, but I barely ever use this. I just stick to the normal Unwrap UVW modifier because it lets me see what's going on in here. So moving on, I think I will start with this hood piece. And I'm going to start just by marking out some seams. Actually, I can do this part just because it is a single plane. So there's nothing to go wrong with a part like this. I can just do a quick plainer map and this one is done. And now I can move onto this hoodie. So I'm going to cut around the sort of inner edge here. Again, you can see there is definitely an edge missing here that I'm going to have to add back in. Sometimes some edges or engons you can sort of leave and have them just be triangulated on export if they're sort of if you can tell that they're more or less there's no way that they can go wrong when you triangulate. Some endgons in some areas can be like that where you're looking at it and you can see that, you know, if you just let the software or three SMAX triangulate it on export by itself, it's not really going to do anything wrong there. But in general, it is good practice to make sure everything is quadal triangles when you finish up. There is a ten to polymodifi that lets you set the maximum size of a polygon and it will quadrangulate or triangulate everything underneath that size. So it's probably a better idea to just do that instead. So now I have to figure out where I'm putting the next seam. I know there is a seam in the fabric along here, so that's where I'll put it. And let me make sure to get rid of this one. And I'll put I'll continue the seam going underneath the hood here. And once we get down here, I'm not sure what I'm going to do in that area yet. So I'll just do the same thing for the other side now. And you can see the pathing isn't quite going where I wanted it to there. And you can see, maybe this isn't ideal to have in your UV map, this sort of harsh angle, so that's something we're going to have to do a little bit later when I'm adjusting the UVs. So what I'll do is once it gets underneath the hood here in a more hidden area, maybe I'll extend one more edge, and I'll just cut it off here. U Hang on. I think I've accidentally put some seams on the wrong part. I'll do something like this and let me do the same on the other side. The reason I'm cutting it off like this is because I don't want to leave a very thin small ring going all the way around the back. Um although there wouldn't be too many issues with doing that either. But again, I'm just doing things quickly here just so I can have a flat UV map. And once I have everything flattened out in the two D view, then, you know, not only does it let me make test sakes, also, if I have everything flattened in the two D view, it lets me make more educated choices about how I'm going to further split stuff up and refine it. So that's another reason why I like making this sort of quick test UV, a very rough UV map because, you know, none of this work is really being wasted. Once I have things flat in the two D view, I can sort of work with the parts more easily and make better decisions regarding how I'm going to approach other things further down the line. You know, I'm still putting these seams in roughly the right spot, you know, where I anticipate I'm going to be having them. I'm usually putting them along seams in the fabric or right here, what I'm doing with the hood is putting it along where, you know, two different parts join to each other. So this is, you know, you can treat this basically the same as a seam, because if you imagine this as a sort of pattern or a the flow of, you know, a fabric weave, then obviously that sort of pattern doesn't cross over between two different objects, does it? It sort of stops on one of them, and it will sort of maybe be at a slightly different angle on the other object. Uh, so my UV editor just closed I must have hit a shortcut or something. And there's the hood, let me turn on the texture checker so I can see how these look. Now, these are really rough. This is definitely something I'm going to have to work on quite a bit more later on when I go into the refining pass, sort of oddly shaped and stuff like this definitely isn't what you want to have in your final result. But this is just sort of step one. Now for this upper hood let me just check the hi poly if there is a seam anywhere along it, like the back or something like that. And it doesn't look like there is. Obviously, that is slightly unrealistic, but not all that uncommon. I mean, it doesn't really change anything. But in cases where there is no seam along the fabric, or this applies sort of as well to, you know, other objects where, you know, some objects just don't have seams on them, like hard surface parts and stuff like that or just organic shapes. You won't have a seam on a part of the body and stuff like that. Then you just put the seams in sort of less visible areas. This obviously is just a result of the edge or point to point selection tool, not really pathing correctly. So let me re unwrap this part. And now I can go for this hood. And these parts are still split off. The thing is if you use quick peel on parts that are already split up that already have map seams on them, let me turn on MPsmVew. You can see that map seems are here. It won't sort of attach those parts to what you're peeling, so you will have to sort of go in and either manually reattach them or get rid of those peel seams. That is not the right side to have his part on. Okay. I think that's all of the hood done. Let me turn the texture checker back on just to see, that's the use for the hood. Again, another issue I'm spotting here, this cylinder doesn't go all the way up into that hole. Another thing I'm going to have to go and fix. Yeah, the low poly is a little bit rough and this is normal. It just means that I'm going to have to go through and refine it a little bit more. Moving on to these belts, Again, you're probably noticing I'm not really using text tools all that much, even though I told you to install it. Like I said, I don't find text tools all that useful for the soft surface stuff, because, I mean, I can't really imagine anything much more easy and fast to work with when it comes to what I'm doing right now than just, you know, marking out a seam, clicking the expand polygon selection button and then clicking Quick Peel. That's all I'm doing right now. So, you know, I don't really need text tools or any sort of plug in to do stuff like that, right? This is all pretty straightforward. So now, I prefer to put my scams on the sort of inner edge where it's less visible. So if I look at the front, you know, that seems not really visible. I could put it here, but this, I feel like is a little bit too far, and I sort of you know, I don't want it bending over all that way in the Ui map. So I'm going to put it here and do the same on the bottom side. Although for a belt like this, I suppose I could not detach the entire backside and just have it unfold, I guess, like this. I have to decide where I'm going to put the back seam, and this spot seems quite hidden, so I'm going to put it here. I'm having trouble selecting the exact edge I want, but that works. Now let's try unfolding this. You can see this is a little bit wonky, and that's because the belts a little bit wonky. You can see has that shape to it. And also just the quick Peel tool doesn't do an ideal job on sort of straight objects like this. It always will leave a little bit of curvature to it just because of how it works, and this is something we're going to have to refine later. But I'm leaving it like this for now because I just want to be quick with this process. So moving on to this one. This one is not as easy to select, of course, because this isn't a consistent edge loop. It's got a lot of triangles attached to it. And otherwise, just results of me optimizing the shape and getting rid of unnecessary polygons. That makes it a little bit harder to select, but it's not like it takes very long either way. Moving on to this one. Now, let's see. This part could perhaps be optimized a little bit more since most of it isn't visible. So maybe that's something I will look at later on. But for now, I'm just going to unwrap it and see how it goes. Yeah, definitely looks like I maybe forgot to finish this part up. I'm not sure. We'll see. It's probably going to be something I will be getting back to And the reason why I'm not making my selection on the very back side for this part, like, over here, where it would be even less visible is because that's sort of introducing a little bit too much warping in the UVs. If you can imagine unfolding this part, that would mean that this outer edge loop would need to be scaled outwards a lot more in order to be sort of stretched around the exterior of these remaining parts. So if you can imagine another edge loop going all the way around this, it would obviously have to be distorted in space and stretched outwards more than all of these surrounding parts, which is a little bit inefficient, and it just makes sense to keep that seam right there. So moving on to the bottom belt, I'll put this on the lower side. I think I put it on the top side on the other side, on the other one. It's probably going to be a good idea to move it to the bottom side later on, yes, I have to put the seam around the back as well. I'm trying to put it in a similar spot to the other one. There's no real reason for that. But because this entire part is basically hidden behind that other pouch, I thought it might be a good idea to line them up for whatever reason. It's not particularly important. Now, it looks like this belt, I'm remembering it ends here. So I'm just going to open up the back side as well. And maybe the back side of this also isn't ideal. Something we're going to have to go in and clean up a little bit later. I accidentally closed the UV editor. Let me bring back the texture checker. If it disappears for some reason, just toggle it on and off. And let me pack these UVs back in so I can see what's going on here. Again, the packing tool seems to be misbehaving a little bit and stacking things on top of each other. Not entirely sure what's going on there, but I'm hoping it will resolve itself as I continue unwrapping some of these parts. Now for this side, This looks like a result of me just deleting every other edge, and I probably didn't remember to check these internal parts to see if it did a good job and didn't mess anything up here. So, yeah, that's on me a little bit, but something I'll fix when I get to it. Okay, so the belt is more or less done here. Let me focus on the bigger parts for now, and I will get to all these buckles and little details a little bit later. So here's this other belt. And that's done. Now, this part, again, I've left an engon here accidentally. Something I'm going to have to go through and clean up. You just go ahead and peel it off though and pick an edge on the back side of this where it's going to be less visible. And this should do, I think. So to sort of explain what I've cut out here. Well, I guess it'll be self explanatory once I peel this. So you see by what I did there, I got a pretty nice unwrap of this part. So when you're cutting stuff, sort of imagine it unfolding like a box, especially for box shaped parts like this. By adding these cuts in it pretty much lets every single face unfold completely flat. And if I look at this from the front, I basically can't see any of those seams. Although seeing seams is slightly less important now than it used to be because it's quite easy to texture across edges. Oh, it looks like I rotated my camera around the wrong way when I was unwrapping this. I thought I was facing at the back direction, but it turns out I was facing the front, so messed up a little bit here and put on the seams on the front, but I'll fix this later on. I'm just going to move on to the next part now. So when it comes to parts like this, basically tubes and stuff made by splines, they can be tricky to unwrap straight. Essentially, a part like this, you would want to unwrap it, so it's completely straight basically line or a rectangle in the Ui map, but it can be a little bit tricky to do. Right now, because I'm just doing the quick UVs, I'm not going to be focusing on straightening these parts out. But later on, I will be doing that. And you can see if I select multiple objects at a time, then you can peel multiple objects at the same time. Let me just turn on element select, so I can select all of these elements. And yeah, I'm just relying on quick peels. Although, for some reason, this side turned out a lot better than the other side. Quite strange. Let me just check the map scenes. It looks like there's quite a few odd map sms on this side that aren't on the other side. Let me just fix that. So doing a planar map will get rid of any map seems. And now if I do a quick feel, you can see the result is a lot more similar to the other side. Not sure why those map seems are there because I'm pretty sure I did, you know, a planer map on all of the objects of this character, but, you know, who knows? These boots are quite complex, and so are the gloves. I'll do this belt here now. And I want to put the seam on the bottom edge, don't I? It's a little bit hard to see when I've got the objects selected, and it's a little bit hard to select that exact edge. Maybe I'll try the other side where it'll be a bit easier. Again, I keep turning off the modifier just because I press three when I still have an object selected. Or I press three to enter Face Select mode when I'm already in Face select mode, just because I forget that I am in Face select mode, and then that just turns off the modifier basically. This part is a little bit tricky. Nothing too bad though. So I think I actually want to detach the front part. So that sort of makes this back seem a little bit unnecessary. So what I'm going to do instead is cut off all of these front edges. K. Again, it's a little bit hard to see because I have this object selected, but I can still see what's going on well enough. On cylindrical objects, especially the pathing seems to struggle a little bit more so you have to put your points a little bit closer together. Okay. Let me just turn off the map seams. Yeah. That looks good. Now I do need to add one extra cut to cut towards the end. Now, I'm not sure if this seam on the front will be very visible or not. It's something I'm just going to have to check. Um, and maybe just when I get trying out the texturing. But it's quite hidden there behind a bunch of objects, so it shouldn't be too bad and I don't want to put an additional seam on the back side of this object, so this should be enough. Again, I accidentally pressed three while I was already in Face select mode and turned off the UV editor. Sorry, that's just out of habit. I'm going to turn off element select because I don't want to select the entire element. I just want to select the seam selection, I guess, and quick feel this part Okay. And I'm suspecting that this part won't quick peel very well. Well let's see what happens, but I'm pretty sure I need to add, yeah, a few additional seams going around these internal pockets at the very least. Sorry, I pressed three again. I keep doing that. I meant to press two in this case. So this will be probably a little bit easier if I just use the select tool and convert my selections to seams instead of using the point to point selection tool. And let me do the same on the other side. Okay. That should do. And, uh Okay. Now I'm going to put a seam along where these two parts sort of split apart. Again, this is kind of an odd shape, so I don't think there's a very ideal way to have this unwrap, but in general, put your seams along seams and where objects meet up. And this guess is probably going to be some sort of tiling texture. I'll want to apply to this strap. So having a seam between the two layers of the strap makes sense. And I will need a seam around the back here as well. The auto saves are a little bit annoying, but again, if you remember, when I had that crash earlier, it's definitely nice to have an auto save just in case. Okay, let's see how this part peels now. That's definitely different, but I would not say it's a very good improvement. And the reason for that is because it's still not sort of cut in a way that will let it unfold entirely. So I'll try adding the same sort of seam down here at the ends. Okay. You know, I'm sort of because of the way this object loops in on itself. I'm just going to cut it into smaller pieces, and then later on, I can sort of reattach them to each other. And God, I keep making that mistake of pressing three too often. Okay, so this also doesn't look very good. So it must mean something is attached to something else. Maybe I will try doing a peel or a pelt map instead. I guess it was just too odd of a shape for the quick peel to figure out. And maybe I'll try that for this area as well. Okay, so this part definitely needs a little bit of cutting to get it to work. Yeah, parts that do like a 180 tend to sort of mess with peel and pelt unwrapping. So I'm going to add a cut that goes along the end here. And once I have peeled or pelted these parts, I can easily always go back and reattach them to each other because I just want to do a quick job here, you know, I might skip that, but it's something I'm definitely going to have in the end result once all of this UV mapping is finished. It looks like we still have parts that are connecting to each other. Oh, no. That's quite odd. Looks like I missed one edge on one of these corners. That's right. I miss clicked and hit the wrong one. We still have this odd shape here. I'm just going to split this part off. Now there are no really odd This is still quite odd. Um Okay. Okay. Now there's definitely nothing that can go wrong with these parts because they've been cut up into small little pieces. So that should be fine. And later on, I'll figure out how to stick them back together in a more efficient way. For now, this will be okay. Moving on to the inside of this. Actually, let me just check how long this episode has been running for. Okay, so it looks like it's time to end this episode. I'm just going to pack all of these UVs in. And yeah, that's all for this one. Um, should be done with the quick UVs fairly shortly. So I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for watching. 44. 04 Base Unwrapping Part3: Welcome to Chapter four of the UV unwrap. In this chapter, I'm just going to be continuing where I left off, and I might start moving into time lapses soon. You know, I'm pretty much just using all the same tools I was in the last two episodes. So, you know, I'm pretty sure that gives you a pretty good understanding of what I'm doing here. And if I use anything new, then I'll make sure to let you know with some commentary. But for now, maybe I'll just keep it real time for the next few parts that I'm making. So I'm just cutting around the bottom edge of the sleeve pocket. And that should be fine. And let's see. Just go to quick peel it. That looks good. And I'm going to cut the corners of this part as well. Looks like the peel tool took a little shortcut around that corner, so I'd like to fix that. And just cutting these corners so it spreads out nicely when I peel this part. Now let me peel this part again and select that corner. That's much better. Now, although all of the faces are mapped here, it's still probably not quite good enough. I'm probably going to want to split off the actual pocket as well. I'm going to go ahead and mark out the edges of that. Although I'm looking, I probably do want to do this. We'll see. Again, another edge missing here. I must have forgotten to add that in. I'll cut around through the bottom here and add that in later. And just sort of remember that I have that little issue there. It might be a good idea to take a screenshot or use the snipping tool to take a screenshot of problem areas like these, so you have a sort of checklist you can go through and fix all of these issues when you're doing your final pass on the UVs. I didn't do that here, but I will be going through and fixing everything a little bit later. It looks like I actually selected a few edges that I didn't really want to here. And let's see what I actually want to follow the sort of parts of the pocket here. So something like this, or maybe like this. Again, I'll see how this turns out in the bake. Let me unselect this phase. And this one. You can see this part has sort of straightened itself out. That's kind of what we want to see, although maybe this whole isn't ideal. We'll see about that later on. And now let me take a look at how this pocket looks. Okay, so pretty similar to what I had before. Maybe it's a little bit better in terms of, you know, some of these internal parts not being as squashed as they were. I'm going to cut the top of the pocket off, and, you know, I'm sort of realizing here that modeling this little tab in here probably isn't ideal, so I will want to go back and change that later on, when I get to refining the UV map and the low poly, like I've said a couple of times before now, right now, I'm just trying to finish this up, this quick UV so I can start, you know, putting this into Mamasete and seeing how it looks there. Because, you know, it's pretty important to sort of have your mesh in marmoset, you know, as reasonably soon as you can, just so you can start looking at it in there and seeing, you know, what's going on. So These are kind of like messy areas. Maybe there's not an ideal way to cut around here. You shouldn't worry about little parts that are sticking out like that too much on your UV maps. Sometimes it is unavoidable. Sometimes it's a little bit more avoidable, but, you know, often it just is what it is. And if you have a little corner like that, there's not too much you can do about it. I'm going to cut the little corners in here, though, just so this edge part spreads out better. You can see that there's a little bit of warping around the edges here. Now, like I've said, these days, warping UVs and warping in UVs in general, you know, just having them be a little bit skewed and stuff like that. It's not really a bad thing when it comes down to it, especially when you can duct in substance painting and sort of paint across seams without too much issue these days. It's not a big deal if you have slightly warped UVs, and in some cases, it's something you do want in order to sort of maximize the use of UV space and stuff like that. But where it's unnecessary, it is nice to avoid it. So that's why I'm cutting in all of these corners just to sort of get rid of those warped corners because they don't really help anyone. And again, you can see quite a few angons that I've left here, probably because I forgot to do a pass with, you know, the selection by edge number, which is something you can use to very easily see if you have too many gns or not. Not too many, but if you have engons in general. Now this part has unfolded quite nicely, but it's splayed out in this awkward way that often means that the Pelt tool will do a better job at straightening out. This is a little bit better. Still not perfect. I would like these to be right angles, but for the quick UV pass, this is good enough. Now I have this little tab here. So I'm just going to go ahead and do a point to point selection. Just going to mark the seam along the bottom of this little tab. And when it comes to the end part, when it loops in on itself, for now, I'm just going to split it off as a separate island. And later on, I will think of a better way to sort of unwrap this specific area, you know, in such a way that makes texturing very easy to where I can just slap on a material in substance painter and have the tiling sort of work itself out on the material, you know, like the fabric texture and not have too many seams to worry about. What I'm doing here isn't ideal yet, but like I said, I'm just doing things quickly, so I have a sort of, you know, quickly unwrapped UVs that I can work from from there and sort of see what I need to do with topology still, and, you know, it's just easier when you have a rough unwrapped first. You may have seen earlier there in the two D view, the sort of UE map for the main pocket part, looks like it, you know, freaked out, completely messed up for a second there. Lot of reasons for this. One of the main ones is just three Max being buggy. The UV editor tends to do stuff like this. You know, it sucks. It's definitely no good when it does stuff like that. Another thing that caused it is engons or non manifold geometry. So non manifold geometry is sort of like, you know, if you imagine you have a plane, and then you also have vertices connected perpendicularly or another face connected perpendicularly to that plane in the middle of it. It's hard to explain, but basically, it's geometry that, you know, is messed up and you don't really want. Engons also mess with the UV editor as well, as well as vertices on top of each other. But in general, in this case, I think it is just three SMAC being a little bit glitchy. Sometimes what you saw there can just be a visual issue, just in the UV editor. And if you close the modifier and open it up again or reopen three DS Max, sometimes those issues go away. Other times, those issues are actually present in the UV map. It's just something you sort of have to deal with. Right now, I'm not too worried about this because this is a very rough unwrap. And, you know, I'll do a test bake and see what happens. And I will go through on how to sort of troubleshoot these issues and solve them later when I'm doing the actual, you know, proper final unwrap, right now, I'm just trying to get this done as quickly as possible so I can sort of, you know, have that rough base there and start seeing all of the issues that I still need to address in the geometry and, you know, have a starting point from where I can start to work out how exactly I'm going to split these islands up and split this object up into materials. So not too worried about those weird issues with the UV editor right now, but I'll definitely be addressing them later. Already here, I'm seeing a lot of issues and things that I've missed when doing the re topology. So the back side of that face of that strap there definitely isn't up to scratch. There's a bunch of extra edges in there that I'm going to have to get rid of later that, you know, I just missed when I was doing the retppo. These parts are really easy to unwrap. As you can see, I just do a selection around the bottom edge loop and then cut the corners in, and then it's just a quick unfold and I get a pretty good result. Of course, all of these results for the final parts will need some tweaking. Ideally, all of these lands would be completely straight. That makes them very easy to pack and also makes them easy to texture because, you know, any material you apply, any sort of tiling elements, which, you know, is what you have a lot of with fabrics. You have the texture of the weave. Basically, that will line up with the edges, and it'll look a lot more realistic and better than if you have won key curvy parts. So, yeah, for all of these parts, I'm just selecting the, you know, bottom edge loop. So that's the edge loop that's sort of least visible to the camera, in my opinion. And, you know, just doing a selection of that, then converting that selection to seams and then also selecting and converting a few of the corner parts to a selection as well just to get everything to unfold flatly. So I like the workflow of marking out seams with the seam marking tools and then using a quick peel or any of the other tools. You know, sometimes I'll use the Pel tool as well, just when quick Peel gets a little bit too confused. Peel is also definitely useful, but that's coming on going to be used a little bit later on when I want to, you know, perfect these UVs a little bit more. Right now, I'm just going for a rough result. The main thing I'm really aiming for is to roughly, you know, have a reasonable textil density. So not to have areas that are too squashed on the UV map and not to have overlapping areas, which is enough to, you know, get a reasonable big done, you know, something where all of the details will actually show up, but the big definitely won't be good or acceptable for, you know, a production standard or something you would want in your portfolio unless it's like a really quick piece where you just want to throw some colors on a sculpt or something like that. But, what we're doing now is going to be super rough. But I find the seam workflow to be really quick and easy. You know, you just have to make edge selections, and edge selections are really easy to make through other objects. If you have stuff in front of the thing you need, you can just use Altex to enter ghost mode, and then, you know, you can reasonably easily select edges that are hidden behind Aerobjects anyway, which isn't something you can really do with faces. So yeah, that's why I kind of like the workflow of marking seams and peeling. Textal sort of doesn't really rely on seams, which is why I'm not using it much. But the tools I do like from textols are the ones that are more for organizing UV islands and straightening stuff out. Now I'm going to work on this O ring or key ring, and you can see in the three D view, I'm finding it pretty hard to mark a seam down here because I only want to mark a seam on one side of this cylinder. But if I select the entire edge loop, it goes all the way around. So what I'm going to do is make my selection in the two D view where the edge loop win go all the way around. So I'm going to have to split the ends off of the UV island. And then in the two D view, you can see that I can pick out whichever edge I want. And because in the two D view, the end caps are split off. The edge loop won't follow around all the way around the object, and I'll only have one edge of the cylinder selected instead of both the top and the bottom edge. So you can see that's a much better result than having the cylinder cut into two halves. You could have just as easily marked two seams, you know, like I had before with the selection in the three D view. And, you know, then it would have been peeled in two sections because it would have been cut in half, basically. And then well did those two sections together. But I feel like it's good to know when you can use the two D view to make your selections and, you know, how those selections might work differently to the three D view if you have your UV island split up in the two D view. You know, edge loop selections won't follow through the whole mesh. They'll only follow through whatever is there in the two D view. So that's quite useful to know, I think, and quite useful to use. Right here, I'm using a little bit of the text tools, specifically the Iron button or tool here, which, you know, just basically does the same thing as quick peel, except, you know, you can't use seams. You can't expand a selection to seams, and, you know, it won't follow the marked out seams. It'll just do basically a quick peel on your selected faces, which is kind of why I don't use it much. Here, half the reason I'm really using it is just to, you know, show you guys that you can use it. And where it might be applicable. So on a hard surface object like this or, you know, an object where you've got, you know, areas of flatness that you may want to select, you know, basically areas where select by angle works. So in this case, the front and the back, you can just select by angle quite easily and select all those front and back faces. In areas like that, the Rn tool is a little bit faster because it's one less button to click. But, you know, sometimes making face selections isn't as convenient. For example, this middle section, um, it would be a little bit trickier to make a face selection for the parts that are underneath that little strap and stuff like that. So most of the time, I'm still using edge selections and text tools, you know, the iron tool, definitely useful sometimes, but I don't really use that much on characters. The main reason I have text tools is really it has a few UV Island alignment tools. For a lot of time, I like the Peel tools. They do the bulk of my UV unwrapping work, really. Over here, I'm just selecting the back edges of these little, you know, wire strap loops or whatever they are, buckles because generally, you want to put your seams where they're not visible. It's less important these days with substance painted. I think I mentioned before, you know, it's easy to paint across seams and hide them. But it's still better to hide the seams because on shiny surfaces, sometimes seams can be visible regardless, and it can take quite a lot of troubleshooting to eliminate a seam entirely on a shiny surface. That's just how normals are sometimes when you are using normal maps and baking. And regardless, even if it's a less shiny surface, if you're using a lot of grunge maps on that area, and sometimes triplanar projection of grunge maps isn't exactly what you want. And, you know, sometimes just a regular planear projection works better. Or, you know, just tiling it over works better than a triplina projection. But if you have your seam on the front side, then you're going to have to go in and paint out that seam, which is really annoying. So yeah, it's better to hide your seams regardless, even though substance painter does make it easier to paint across them. If you can avoid having to paint across them just by having the seams in areas where they're a lot less visible or aligned to features in the geometry. Then obviously do that because it's going to make texturing just a little bit easier for you. Working on this tiny little part. Again, just put your seams wherever it makes sense to make the object flatten out, basically. A good mentality to have basically is imagine you're trying to make this out of paper or imagine it like a sweet wrapper or something like that, I guess, or as a cardboard box you would assemble and place your seams where they would be on that box, I guess. I guess that's really basic stuff, and most you probably know stuff like that. Again, this is the rough UV unwrap. So these aren't necessarily final UVs, but on small parts like this, that pretty much will do just because they're so tiny. You don't want to really be spending too much attention on them, and at the end of the day at that scale, you can pretty much do, you know, it's really diminishing returns how much thought you put into a tiny object like that. So yeah, don't really overthink tiny areas like this or things that are mostly hidden like this belt buckle, I guess. So moving on to this buckle tongue or whatever this buckle part is called, I tried to get face selection to work here because it's kind of hard to select an object that is completely inside another object. Of course, I could go through and make an edge selection, but it's a little bit tricky in this area. And I was hoping maybe making a face selection could give me a quick, you know, one or two click solution. But, of course, I didn't quite work out. So next thing I try is maybe doing a phase selection on sides to at least, take out some of the work for me. But you notice that I pressed Quick Peel a few times, and this part wouldn't detach from the rest of the match when I quick peeled. And that is because I had detached toggled off. So if you look at the two D UV editor, you'll notice that it also has a quick peel button. But below that button, there are a few options. So one of them is detached toggle. If you have that toggled off, basically the quick peel tool won't detach the selected faces from the rest of the object when it's trying to peel. It will just peel the entire object. If you have it toggled on, it will quick peel only the selected faces and detach them from the rest of the island. So that's a good thing to remember is that that's an option you can toggle. Most of the time I have it set to detach because that's generally more useful, right? About now, I want to check which parts I've already done and which parts I may have missed in the UV mapping process. There's a pretty useful view for this, so head to the top right corner drop down of the UV editor and select area distortion view. And what this will basically do is show areas with low textile density in red and high texle density in blue. And generally, you want to avoid very red areas on prominent parts of the model. So anywhere that will be visible, you can have it in end caps or whatever parts won't be visible basically at all, but generally, you want to avoid red areas. Only issue with this tool is it's quite heavy on performance. It will really slow down the FPS in your viewpod. So, you know, once you take a look, you can pretty much turn it off because, you know, it can be quite annoying to work with a low FPS viewpoard. So as you can see there, I noticed that the unwrap on the top part of the neck was actually pretty bad. And then, you know, also pretty much done everything apart from the gloves and the boots. So, Area distortion view can be pretty useful whenever you want to just either check if there are any parts you haven't done at all, or if you want to check the actual quality of your unwrap as well. Just doing this hearing here, basically the same thing I did for all of the tubular style objects. As you can see here, you can actually quick peel separate UV islands at once. So if you select, you know, two islands that are marked out by seams and use the quick peel with detached selected, it will quick peel those two islands separately. It won't lump them into one, which is quite useful to know if you have, you know, an object that's been split up into a bunch of islands using the seam marking tools, and you just want to unwrap them all in one go. Okay, moving on to the boots, this is no different to what I've been doing on the rest of the body. You know, just following landmarks on the object and following seams on the fabric. There aren't really any fabric seams on the boots, but, you know, there's parts where the cloth meets the rubber or there's different layers of cloth. So I'm basically cutting along those borders. Give me for having the toolbar pop up at the bottom here, I should go away any second now. So I'm just cutting along the edge of this front sole, and I'll be doing the same for the back sole and also any straps that are going across this boot. For straps, it's quite important because generally, you want to be able to quickly apply smart material or, you know, set up in general, a material that goes along with the direction of the straps. So, you want your fabric weave or texture to be going along the direction of the strap, so it's not, you know, going diagonally across it or waving across it because that's not how straps look in real life, right? I real, straps are woven in the same direction that the strap is. And it's very hard to do if you don't straighten out your UV island, and it's very hard to straighten out a UV island that is in the middle of another object, right? So those pretty much have to be split off in order to make texturing quite easy and actually look good. So yeah, I'll be splitting off any straps and soles of the boots, and any part that is kind of separate, like the whole top part or the top layer of the boot there, shoe rather, I guess this is more of a shoe. And I guess I'll split off the inside as well and that cap just to make those parts easy to bake as well. Again, I'm just being really quick here. There's a few places that I'm noticing here where I might adjust the exact flow of the edges just to make it a little bit smoother to unwrap and to make things line up a little bit better. This is just a first pass at UV mapping. You can see it's a really quick process. I know a lot of people really hate UV mapping. I don't mind it at all. I definitely prefer it to topology just because firstly, it takes less time and it's a little bit easier for me at least. I know beginners definitely struggle to wrap their heads around UV mapping. It's not so bad. You can see this quick UV map. You know, it's so fast to do this. And, you know, this can get you passable results, right? This will look basically fine when it's baked. You know, it won't look great because there will be low resolution areas or, I should say, it won't look professional. But from a distance or if you crank your texture resolution there high, it will probably look okay. It won't be fun to texture because, to make texturing nice and smooth and easy, you need to sort of line up your islands and straighten stuff out nicely. Which is going to be, you know, probably most of what I'll be doing for the rest of these UVs, perfecting them, straightening out the islands so they stack together nicely in the UV map, and so they're easy to detach. That's basically most important things because figuring out textil density and just getting rid of overlapping faces in the UV map, that's really easy. That's what I'm doing now basically in terms of overlapping faces. You just mark out some scenes and hit Quickpeel and that pretty much handles that most of the time. Sometimes you need to do a little bit of tweaking, but that stuff's easy. The harder stuff or the stuff where, you know, it really sets you apart from being an amateur or more of a professional person is having a UV map that will bake nicely and will make it easier to take. Now, I'm pretty much done with the shoes here. Or the shoe, because both shoes are identical, so I only have to unwrap one of them. I'm going to split off the cap there, and you can see probably in the Tudview that there's something crazy going on with the UVs over there. Now, I'm going to chalk this up to three DS MAX being buggy. Again, I've said before, there may be several reasons for this. Maybe engons are making it tricky. Maybe there's some non manifold geometry that I've left there by accident. But a lot of the time, it's just three SMAX being buggy, and sometimes it's purely a visual bug. So if you close the UV map modifier and then open it up again, it can be fixed, or if you close three S MAX and open it up again, it can also be fixed. That's what I found it to be most of the time. It's usually just a visual bug. Sometimes it actually does go in and distort your UVs for no reason. I'm basically going to ignore it for now. Of course, it's a much bigger issue when you're trying to finalize your UVs and, you know, finish up. But for now, you know, I'm assuming this is a visual bug, and I'm just going to leave it this way. And I'll do my bakes and I'll see what happens there, and I will definitely go through the whole process of troubleshooting issues like that. It's something that happens, and it can be really alarming when it does, if you don't know why it's doing that and you think you're doing something wrong. Sometimes you are doing something wrong, but I found that it's just through ESMAx being buggy, so I will be troubleshooting all of that a little bit later. Right now, I just want to finish this basic unwrap. So I'm going to move on to the gloves. But I'll be doing that next chapter. I'm going to end this one here, and the next chapter will be the last one on doing these quick UVs. And after that, I can move on to putting this all into Moms toolbg and seeing what we have there. So that's all for this one, and I'll continue exactly where I'm leaving off here in the next one. See you there. 45. 05 Base Unwrapping Part4: Welcome to Chapter five of UV mapping. In this chapter, I'm going to be finishing up all of the remaining parts really quickly. So what I need to do now is reimport the hi poly for the gloves because the original hy poly I imported was not offset, right? It's the original one. And if you remember, I slightly offset the position of the arms. So I need to go and find the hypoly that's already been offset. Here it is. Just reimported it. Of course, I could have just never deleted that high polyp in the first place, but I did what I did. So I have to go ahead and reimport it. And the reason why I need this is so I can line up the UV seams with the seams on the high poly because it would be nice to have, you know, the seams in those same places. It would make texturing easier, and it would hide those UV seams because the seams would be where the seams are around the high poly. So really no problem there. So it's kind of hard to figure out the correct visibility in order to be able to see the seams and the wire frame of your low poly at the same time. I found that having the high poly transparent and having the low poly opaque gave me a pretty good result. I could pretty much see everything I needed to do. And, you know, with the wire frame turned off for both the low poly and the high poly, because the point to point selection tool pretty much, you know, helps you select everything you need, even if you can't see the wireframe. So I found this to be the easiest setup, but it might be different if your seams are slightly different. They might not show up through the low poly like they do for me here or something else. So you really have to play around and, you know, try having the low poly transparent, try having the hypoly transparent. And, you know, with wireframe mode turn on and off, just see what works for you. It's different, you know, depending on how your hi poly looks and how you've done your seams. But this should probably work for most people, I'm guessing. So yeah, just following the big main seam that goes along the glove. You can see they're slightly off center here. This is another thing I'm going to have to remember and just in my low poly. And the reason why they're slightly off center from the actual seams on the high poly is because if you can remember, this glove was basically just adapted from the right glove, and they are slightly different to each other on the high poly. So, you know, I haven't accounted for that, and these seams have ended up slightly off center. It's going to be something I will have to get back to later on. On the left glob, I found that the things were pretty much spot on, just like the way I made them. So nothing too much to change there. So that's pretty much just one seam that goes around all the way from the top and the bottom half, and then the thumb comes off, and then there's that little panel on top. Slightly trickier area is the rolled up cuff, but it's not too hard. Overall, doing the basic UVs for these gloves is pretty quick, of course. But when it comes to gloves or, you know, more broadly hands in general, it can be kind of tricky to get a very good result. And what I mean by a good result is having all the fingers straightened out and sort of more or less rectangular. That's the sort of shape that is most efficient in terms of saving UV space because it's a lot easier to pack around a rectangular object as opposed to, you know, a hand that's splayed out like a starfish, of course. And a hand that's sort of been straightened out like that in the UV island also makes texturing easier and in general, is a little bit better in terms of distortion, too, but that can be tricky to do to manipulate all the fingers into a straight position without messing them up. So it's going to be something that might be a little bit of a challenge later. We'll see. Now I'm marking out an internal seam for where sort of cuff bends over to the other side. That's something that's easier to do with just this sloply isolated and going into wireframe mode and just doing a loop selection on that area. Overall, pretty straightforward. Nothing too difficult here, just like everything else I've done. But again, you can see some kind of weird visual glitches going on with the two D viewport. You can see that there are a bunch of faces disappearing from my UV islands. And those faces are definitely there. I haven't marked out my seams wrong or anything like that. This is definitely just a bug in three Max. So again, this is another good reason why you should do a sort of quick UV map to sort of troubleshoot and get these issues out of the way. Right now, I'm pretty confident this is just a visual bug, but I can't be 100% sure. Because later on, you know, these things also don't show up when I try and do visualize area distortion. So, you know, I'm not 100% sure these faces are there in the UVs. Maybe they're not UV mapped. Maybe they are. Maybe this is just a visual bug. I'm not 100% sure. This is a really annoying issue that I've have happened in the past, as well. Most of the time, you know, it resolves itself pretty much. Sometimes, like I've said before, it's due to geometry. When I do this quick sort of test unwrap and, you know, I can try and do a bake, that sort of will help me troubleshoot, and I'll see if those faces show up on the bakes and the UV map. And that will basically let me know if they are actually UV mapped and this is just a visual bug or if there's something, you know, worse going on, right? And those faces aren't UV mapped at all. In this case, the issue sort of went away when I restarted three years max, so I'm assuming that this was a purely visual bug. In general, I would say, you know, don't worry if this happens. I'm assuming it's a bug. It's happened to me before in the past. TS Max's UV Mapper is known for being a little bit like this. So yeah, don't worry about it too much. It tends to resolve itself, and there's a few things I will do to troubleshoot later on. But for now, I'm just going to try and get it into Mamzette and see how those faces look and if they are baking properly. If they aren't, you know, that'll mean more troubleshooting. And I'll know for sure that this isn't a visual bug, but for now, pretty sure it's just visual. Okay, so moving on to the right glove, basically the same process as what I did for the left glove because these parts are largely the same, aside from a few extra details that have been added. Of course, on the right glove, there's this sort of second sleeve that plugs into it. So unwrapping it is really easy. It's basically a cylinder, so it's going to be really easy to flatten out into a rectangle. Later on, I just need one seam down the side. And it's a little bit tricky to put that seam in because it's underneath the cuff of the glove. So it's much easier to do that in the two D view pot to select those edges. So always remember you can use the two D viewport or, you know, the UV editor view for all of this stuff, right, as well. You can make all of your edge selections. And that's part of why I'm doing this quick unwrap in order to give myself the ability to make, you know, these quick selections and adjustments in the two D view as well as three D one. Because, you know, if you don't have your UVs, at the very least unfolded in a way that you don't have overlapping faces, that's going to be very tricky to do in the two D view or the UV view. As soon as your UVs are, you know, unfolded to at least the extent where there aren't massively overlapping faces, it becomes a lot easier to recognize parts in the two D view and their three D counterparts, right? So, yeah, that's another reason why I'm not really getting into any of the more complicated or really refining this current IAP too much. It's just sort of a base to get me started. Again, unwrapping along this seam that runs basically halfway through the entire glove. On this one, it's lined up much better with the seam on the high poly just because this is the first one I made originally, and, you know, the over glove is just basically adapted from this to that other glove. So it's slightly off, and I'm going to have to go through and adjust it. Again, kind of tricky to select the, you know, edges. I can sort of do that with the ghost view. But it is a little bit tricky. It would probably have been easier if I hid the high poly, but, you know, I didn't think to do that right here. Anyway, I managed to get the edge I wanted selected, and I'm going to also select the sort of ring that goes around the end cap, and that should be enough to unwrap this, you know, part of the glove. There's a few edges that I selected accidentally. So I'm going to unmark those. And give this a quick test done wrap. See what I get. So this looks pretty good, but I don't want the top part there. There is a little bit of an issue of a few faces not showing up again, not ideal, but yeah, three D S MAX being buggy, I guess. So I do want to split off the internal part, and you can see, like, the top edge there where I've subdivided the top edge to give it a few more edges and make it rounder. You can pretty clearly see the exact point where these two parts sort of split up. So I can sort of select that edge in the two D view fairly well, but, um you know, it's not really working because those edges, some of those faces are disappearing in the two D view, and it's kind of messing up the selection a little bit, so not an ideal situation, definitely. Anyway, I managed to split off one half. So another thing to sort of look out for when you're having this issue is your selections in the two D view. It will only select what is visible in the two D view. So when you're having this bug of disappearing faces, uh and you make a selection in the two D view, you won't be able to select those hidden faces, what you need to do is to go into the three D view and expand your selection to SMS, and that will sort of fix your selection. It will also reveal the hidden faces because they will get selected and you'll be able to see them. Again, this is more of a visual bug, I'm hoping, and we'll be getting around to fixing it a little bit later. So all that's left is to cut in these few other panels. And the gloves should pretty much be good to go. Yeah, not all that complicated. I'm noticing that I missed a few parts when I was doing the re topper. There's a few of those little details missing. Another thing I'm going to have to go back and fix in the low poly. But like I mentioned before, you can make minor edits to the low poly and the UVs. You know, they get messed up a little bit, but it's not too bad, and it's quite easy to fix. So like if any edits to the topology really mess up your UVs, you will still be able to just select that UV island and just run a quick peel on it again, and, you know, that will get you to the exact stage where we are at now. So yeah, with these quick UVs, I mean, they're so quick to make that, you know, you don't have to worry about, you know, breaking these when you go back and adjust your low poly a little bit. So I'm going to turn on the area distortion view, so I can check for any more missing parts that I might have on this mesh. And I can see that the sort of back knife holder thing isn't unwrapped yet from this. And another thing you may have spotted there is some of the faces on the gloves were not showing up in the area distortion view, or they were showing up as just a regular material. And that is another reason why I'm a little bit concerned about, you know, all these bugs popping up in the UV editor. So, you know, I guess I'll see when I do the Bakes if those faces actually do have UVW coordinates or not. It's weird, and, you know, I was a little bit hesitant to include this in the actual tutorial. I thought maybe I should re record this without any bugs. But on the other hand, I know how frustrating it is to run into stuff like this as a beginner, and, you know, if you can't find any material on it online, you know, it's really tough to solve this kind of stuff. And I know what's even more frustrating is buying a tutorial. And then having some sort of weird issue pop up in it when you're trying to follow it, and it's not addressed in the tutorial. So, I've decided to leave this in. If you're really lucky, well, not lucky. I'm sure most of you won't experience this. But yeah, if you're unlucky enough to have the same issue, hopefully this will help. That's why I've decided to leave all of this in the tutorial and not just try and re record it and get rid of all of these issues with the UV editor. Okay, moving on to the mechanical arm. So I have said before that for hard surface retopper, you do need to kind of be quite specific about your edges and how you handle your UVs. And yeah, this is definitely true. But what I'm going to be doing now is, you know, being a bit fast and loose with these UVs. I'm definitely not going to be paying perfect attention to what I'm going to be doing here, right? I'm not going to be doing ideal hard surface UVs here. I'm just going to unwrap these parts and make them flat basically for now for this initial bake. First reason being is when I have these parts laid out flat, it lets me mark out my seams more easily. Especially with that ampa area with all that stuff that's underneath each other. And there's several overlapping parts here. So, you know, having all of these meshes and all of this topology in a flat UV view to make it easy for me to mark seams or select make polygon selections to you know, continue the unwrap. It's going to be helpful. Another thing is, it can be helpful to have test bake visible, so you can see where you're having more issues on your actual bake. So where you can see really severe gradients across the normal map, I will go in and explain further what those gradients are and why they might be bad. When I actually do those bakes. But that's another thing. Actually seeing those problem areas in your finished bake is a little bit more helpful, and, you know, it gets the process done a little bit faster than, you know, just going over every single edge and deciding whether it should be a hard edge or not and whether you should break the UV island here or not. I find, you know, just do a bake, see what's wrong with it, and then adjust from there is a little bit easier. So yeah, these parts are for now, basically going to be unwrapped the same way I would unwrap any soft surface parts. And to be honest, this usually gives you a decent enough result. Like, it's not a very professional result, but a lot of the time, it can be enough for like a quick texture job. Often, you know, even the hard surface parts unwrapped this way, they won't look terrible. The normal map won't be broken or anything. It's just you can do it slightly better if you pay attention to your edges and, you know, put a little bit more work into the UV map. But this result probably won't be all that bad. Um, you know, if I think about it right now. We'll see, of course, when I actually do bake this. Doing this cylindrical part here, cylinders are super easy to unwrap, right? Just make one cut along the side and, you know, unwrap it into a rectangle, and, you know, you're done, basically. And for the ends, you just unwrap them as a circle. Super simple. So cylinders are probably not something that needs any more explaining. All these other parts. Parts like this, even in the final Ump will look pretty similar. There's not too much more you can really do with something like this aside from spread it out and flatten. Um, you know, you wouldn't really want to put in any more cuts than this on these parts. The actual forearm and up arm parts, those are a little bit more complicated and you will want to go through and cut them up a little bit more. Now, I probably won't need to cut out every single panel that's not really going to benefit me all that much, and it won't really improve the normal map either. More of the problem areas are probably like this seam at the bottom. Chances are that I will want to put a hard edge here and probably split the mesh off here. That's actually what I'm going to do on this On wrap as well. Just split the forum into two separate islands. Again, I'm not 100% sure on any of the decisions I'm making now. I just want to do a quick, fast unwrap here. I'm putting my seams at the back where any of these parts have any sort of detailing or panel lines that allow me to, you know, follow a panel line along the height of this mesh. For the UV seams, that's really great. And I will use that. But for the forearm or the lower arm, there is no detail like that. There's no panel line that spans the entire height. So for that part, you know, I just have to put the UV seam at the back where it's going to be least visible. Of course, on a character's arm, you know, pretty much all of the arm will be visible at some point. So you know, you just have to decide where you're going to put it, and you're going to have to make sure that, you know, the seam isn't visible in your textures, right? Because, you know, the arm is probably going to be visible at all angles at some point, right? Maybe the armpits won't be super visible, but there's no seams that really get put in the armpits all that much. So, yeah, trying to follow hard surface details as much as I can. Later on, I may be splitting. All of these parts, I may not. I'll see how I feel depending on the results of the test bake. So I need to detach this little cylindrical detail chunk from the rest of the arm. Also, with an object like this, I'm not 100% sure how something like this will bake. So it may be that I have to make some more major adjustments to the low poly for this detail, maybe have it as a separate mesh that is clipped into the rest of the arm. I'm not 100% sure here. And yeah, I'll see once I do a couple bakes. But right now I'm just, you know, splitting it off to its own EV island. Like so. All straightforward stuff, just selecting edges and then converting edge selection to seam and then just making that selection and using Quick Peel. It's pretty much the only tools I've been using. For some parts, of course, I will use the Pelt map. I explained that a little bit earlier. Sometimes it can be slightly better than the Peel tool for some problem areas. I've excellently marked some seams here. The pelt tool won't automatically stitch together, pulled apart edges. The pelt tool will. But for this part, it was a little bit too heavy for the pelt mat. So it slowed down and, you know, basically crashed, not the entire pre DSMX application, but just the pelt tool, so I had to cancel out of that. And so instead of trying to get that to work, I'm just going to weld up those edges. So just selecting the edges that need to be welded up together and using custom stitch to stitch them back up. And that's gotten rid of that mess. And that's pretty much all of the parts of the mechanical arm done. So, oh, there's one part I did miss, which is sort of doughnut thing. I forgot to attach that to the rest. Again, this is almost a cylinder, not quite a cylinder, of course. It's a bit more rounded around the edges, but very similar principle. I'm just going to put one seam down here, and then one seam going vertically across it, and I'm going to put that in a place where it's hidden inside all of the other arm meshes. You can see that the quick appeal is all messed up, and that's because there were already a bunch of existing map seams. So I'm going to use Pelt Map to get rid of all of those map seams and, you know, because that's Quipel does not get rid of existing UV edge cuts or seams. The Pelt map does. Everything apart from the blue seams, all of the green map seams will be gotten rid of and everything will be welded back together. So all that's left is this little bolt. So I'm just going to hit it with a quick peel, and that should be everything. I can pack it all in and move on to the head finally. So last parts to do are the skin parts. It's gonna be really quick here. I just pretty much need to do one seam each, and that's actually all that I'm going to need for the final UVs, as well, but I will have to work a bit on straightening these parts out for the final UVs. Okay, I light a bit. It's going to be two seams for the arm because it has that sort of cloth part. I'm actually also going to have to probably set a different material for that bottom half of the forearm where it's covered in a little bit of a sleeve. So yeah, I need to make sure to remember that. Now, for the head, it didn't have any UVs visible in the two DV so I did a quick cleaner map to get those to show up. And now I'm just going to put a seam from the back of the head all the way to basically the top of the forehead. And you pretty much want to put it where the hairline ends. It can go a little bit lower. Um, and that's pretty much where you want your seam. A finished unwrapped head will look pretty similar to what you see in the two D view. But what needs to be worked on is the face needs to be scaled up a little bit, because the face is a lot more important than the size of the head, which are going to be covered in hair. So usually the face is scaled up a lot more. Everything sort of stretched into a more square shape, so it fits into the UV sheet a little bit better. And the eye sockets and the mouth hole are usually sort of shrunk down and straightened out a little bit to make texturing easier and also to save space because you don't really see the inside of the sockets, of course, so there's no reason to give them all that space. But for now, I'm just going to try this because there's no overlapping faces, it will give a roughly, reasonable result, at least in order to check the UVs and to be able to set up my scene in Mama zt. Okay, so that's all for this chapter, and that's all for the quick UVs. And for the next chapter, I'm going to be moving into Maze Tolbag and showing you how to set up your scene for a nice baking experience. See you there. 46. 06 Baking Setup And Test Baking: Welcome to Chapter six of UV mapping and baking. So I've already done my low poly, and I've unwrapped it. So what I can do now is go ahead and do a test bake with all of the rough UVs that I've already got. And in order to do that, I need to export out my high poly. Now, I've already exported the high poly before, but that was a decimated version that was decimated, so it would run quickly in the three S Max viewport and not cause too much lag when I'm trying to make the low poly. Now I need the full resolution high poly or as close to full resolution as I can get. Now, sometimes if you have a really high poly mesh, it can be better to actually decimate it slightly to make it easier to export and import. And I'm talking, files that are reaching over 5 gigabytes can be a real struggle to export and import. It can take a really long time. You can have Zebraf start to crash, and MamoztTolbag also can struggle to render scenes with really high poly meshes. So in those cases, it's okay to decimate your high poly by, you know, up to 50%. Sometimes you can go below that. It depends on how much how really dense your high poly is. You just need to pay attention and, you know, zoom in really close and see if you're losing any detail there. But in general, you know, try and stay above 50% decimation, and the most important thing is to compare your decimated mesh to the one that, you know, the original sculpted mesh and see if there's any detail lost because you don't want to lose any of the detail you put all that hard work into sculpting by just decimating it and then not having it in your bake, right? So keep all of those things in mind. So, the other thing to remember and the other thing to make exporting a little bit easier is to export your mesh in parts. And basically, the way you want to split it up is pretty much the same way that you have split up your low poly into different materials. So I'm going to be exporting one batch, which is all of, you know, the main body meshes, the main cloth body meshes. Then one that is the accessories, like the boots, the belts and the neck thing, and then one that is the skin, and then one for the mechanical arm. The same thing I have on the low poly. And the other thing that will do is make it a little bit easier to organize things in MamozetTol bag because I'm going to be able to drag those high poly files into, you know, different baking groups. It's just going to be a little bit easier to organize, and it's going to be easier to reimport something if I, you know, need to reimport one of the high poly meshes for some reason. Because if you have all of your subtols exported in one object, that actually makes baking a little bit harder if you ever need to reimport because reimporting basically puts all of the subtols back underneath the original sort of import mesh in the hierarchy in Mase tool Dak. So it's a lot easier to do it in chunks because that way, you don't have to redo your baking groups as many times whenever you import something. So yeah, that's all of the things to keep in mind. I'm going to go ahead and quickly export all of these things in chunks. So I'm going to start by exporting all of these skin objects, and I'm going to export them together, and I'll probably have them together on the UV map because there's only a very small amount of shoulder skin here. Now for the face, it actually has poly paint data on it. Poly paint is basically just a vertex color, and I would like to export this and bake this down into a texture. Now you can convert poly paint to textures within Zrush as well. If you just head down to the texture map panel and the create tab here, you can create a new from poly paint. But if you just click it now, all it will do is give you a black texture, and that's because this mesh or subtol has layers, and you need to make sure that you turn off recording and bake them all down. I would advise baking down all of your layers in general before you export because layers can sometimes not export correctly. I found. I'm not sure, but it might be a good idea. Or maybe if you have some issues after you've exported, you can go back and bake down layers just in case. So now if I click New from Polypint you can see we do have a texture. Now, the texture obviously only gets converted to the existing UVs. And if your UVs are bad, or if you don't have any UVs on the subtol then obviously the texture wouldn't really be any use. And in this case, this texture isn't all that useful because only a small part of the texture is actually being used for the face. It's not very high resolution. So instead, I'm actually going to just keep the polypink data. And I'm going to export it and bake it down in zebush which will do a much better job. So to export, I'm just going to isolate the parts that I want to export in each chunk, and that's how I'm going to be exporting things. Now, there's a few ways you can export stuff. What you can do is merge visible and then export them as an OBJ. The OBJ exporter is slightly faster, so it will take less time to export that way. But the thing is, if you merge your subtols together before export, in MamazTolbg, you won't be able to, um, split those subtols up into different baking groups, and baking groups are pretty important in order to stop, you know, overlapping and all sorts of clipping issues from showing up when you're baking. I'd much rather be able to manipulate all of the separate subtols within Marvel Z Tolbag, and for that reason, I need to export them without merging them altogether. Now, there's no way to really do this with an OBJ export. You can try using the three D print Hub, and it has an export to OBJ option, and you can export all of your subtols in one file this way. But what I found with the three D print Hub exporter is, it probably piles in a bunch of extra data into the OBJ file, and it's way slower in Mamo Ze tool bag. So I wouldn't suggest using this. Instead, I'm going to be using the FBX exporter. And, you know, the only issue with this is it's a little bit slow because it has to go through all of the subtols even if you're only exporting visible, for some reason, it goes through all of the subtols and checks all of them. So I'm going to go ahead and export this. I'm just going to export over one of these. I already did a bunch of test exports before recording, but you're obviously going to have to name the files yourself. This does take quite a while. For these high poly meshes, it can take upwards of 10 minutes. So, be patient. A lot of the time Zbrush will actually stop responding while it's exporting. Um so, you know, just because it's not responding doesn't mean it's broken or it's crashed. Sometimes you have to wait a little bit. But if it's taking forever or if it just doesn't export and Zbrush actually completely crashes before it manages to export, you will have to decimate your model slightly. So I'm just going to fast forward while it finishes exporting here. For you, it will probably take longer than what is in the video. So that's the skin exported and done. I'll go and check my folders and see if the exported file is actually big enough. So here's the folder I'm exporting too. And if I check the FBX for the skin, something around 600 megabytes for 12 million points. Points, you probably have to double to get the real polycunt. It's not exactly double, but it's something like that. So this is probably the right size. Really, all you're looking out for is something ridiculous small or zero. So as long as you know, there's a few hundred megabytes in there, then it's safe to assume that it all exported well. So now I'm going to move on to the next part. I'm going to export the main body now. It's probably a good idea to have your low polypile open, just so you can check what goes into what part. You also want to be pretty careful in this process because you definitely don't want to be exporting these things a bunch of times. It's better to get it right the first time and export everything you need in one go. So make sure you're grouping things together the correct way here and make sure you're not exporting decimated objects because I still have the decimated meshes that I exported for the re topology in this file. So make sure you don't export those by accident. Just checking here to see if I included the ropes with the pants and I did not. I need to make sure to add these meshes in with the cloth and this cape on the back as well. Okay. Now, if you want to unhide all of the subtols within folder, just It's not Shift click. It is, I believe, Control click on the little I above the folder to unhide all of the meshes in a in a folder. And I do not need the neck parts or the hoodie. So it's only the cape that I need from here. Okay. And these parts are all here as well. So I think that's everything for this part, although I need to make sure that I don't add these in. So this should be good. Another thing you want to do is make sure that you've got all of your meshes set to the highest subdivision level. And I'm going to export these as well. For options, I haven't used any options here. Nothing we need to do here. Just make sure it's a binary file, and if you're struggling to import for some reason, sometimes it helps to set the FBX format to an older year. And I'm going to fast forward while this exports. So that's the body exported. That took a couple of minutes as well. Now I'm going to move on to the next part. That's going to be all of the accessories. So I'm going to hide everything again and just work my way through the list of subtols really quickly and unhide everything that I'm going to want, everything that belongs to the accessories material group that I set up. Okay. And making sure not to export any of the decimated measures. And I do need to be careful and make sure that I am actually hiding every single subtol that belongs to this material group. I'm going to include the pouches with it as well. Okay. Okay. And I need to also include these shoulder details. Now, I am sort of realizing that I've forgotten to sort of separate these parts out from the rest of the arm because obviously they're not skin colored, or, you know, they're different material. So I should probably decide where I'm going to put them in terms of which material they're going to be in. And I think I'm actually going to put them with the rest of the fabric parts because it's a fairly even straight piece of fabric, so I'm going to have to re export the main body fabric parts with these two objects included, or I may just export them separately. It doesn't really make a difference. So that should be everything I need to export. Actually, I'm just realizing that these belong to the mechanical arm, so I need to hide these, as well as the shoulder and this part. So I think this is what I actually need. Of course, I forgot to re top this head band as well. So I'll have to do that when I get back to the low poly, but this should be everything. Okay. Uh, Okay, that's the accessories done. So now I can do the mechanical arm. Just going to go through the list, hide everything first, and then scroll down and unhide everything that belongs to the mechanical arm. You know, being careful to make sure that I'm definitely selecting and exporting everything that makes up that material group. So I've sped this up because there's nothing really interesting going on here and doing the same exact FBX export. And once this is done, you can finally head into MamosTolbg. Okay, so that export is now done. I skipped ahead here, obviously. It took a lot longer than that. I'm also going to export those two sleeve meshes that I forgot before, and I'm going to have to split those apart on the low poly model later when I get back to fixing the low poly. Now I'm going to be putting everything into Mum's Tolbag and doing the test bake so here I am in Mama Zip Tolbag. Now, when you're importing all of your high poly objects, it can really start to slow down just because, you know, it's a huge amount of polygons to be rendering. Zbrush, it's sort of it's sort of fake three D, and that's what lets it render, you know, hundreds of millions of polygons on screen without too much of a drop in performance. Mama Ze toolbag doesn't use that kind of trickery. Same with PredSMx and most other three D applications. So you know, it won't be able to handle all those polygons like Zbrush does. So a few things to maybe improve performance or stop it from, you know, slowing down completely as soon as you import some stuff. Set it to draft quality, and you can also head into the render options and maybe turn down the shallow quality. And that should be enough. Now I'm going to go and find where I exported all of my high polymshes to. And I'm going to drag them in one by one, just because dragging them in all at once can sort of, you know, be a little bit too much, and, you know, it'll load forever and you won't be sure if Mamasets crashed or not. So I suggest dragging them in one by one. And I'm going to fast forward this part a little bit to skip all the loading. This takes less time than exporting from Zbrush, but it does take maybe a minute or two if it's very big mesh. Okay, and there it is, our high polymsh in Mamas Tolbag. Now, my computer can handle this pretty much fine so far. But if it is starting to slow down, then you can always hide the meshes and that will speed up the viewboard a lot. Now I'm going to quickly import the rest of these. Okay, that's all of our high poly meshes imported. Make sure you save because it is somewhat likely to crash if you have this many polygons in your mamastcene. Another thing you can do if your PC just can't handle it is to bake in parts. So, you know, if you're really struggling, then you can just bake each material individually. But it's slightly better to bake materials that are in contact with each other, because that way, you'll be able to have contact AO between uh, you know, different measures. So for example, well, I'm not going to move viewport around with the high poly in it because it would be too slow, but I guess the only real example I can see here right now is maybe there would be a little bit of contact AO between the skin here and the sleeves here, just like a tiny little shadow line. When I say AO, I mean, ambient occlusion, of course. So, yeah, you can absolutely just bake in separate files if your computer can't handle all of the meshes at once. Mine kind of can, so I'm not going to start splitting stuff up yet, but I am going to hide all the high poly meshes because it is really slow, and you can't really move the p port properly and do stuff properly with all of them visible at once. When you're hiding stuff, it's probably a better idea to just make sure you're hiding only the top a little object here in the hierarchy because, you know, later on, you can sort of start to be annoyed and not realize why some parts are missing or not reappearing. So that's another thing to keep in mind. All of these can be hidden individually, and yeah, now it's time to import the low poly. So I need to export my low poly now, and I'm going to do it the same way I exported the high poly, which is in parts, every material will be exported as a separate OBJ, and that just makes it a little bit easier to sort things in Mama Z tool bag. It's fine if you export them all as one, but I prefer to do it this way. So I'm going to export all of these separately. And I've exported these before just as a little test off screen, off camera. Of course, you're going to have to do it from scratch. The export options aren't super important, but triangulate should probably be turned on. Whenever you're baking normal maps, you need to triangulate your polygons because if they get triangulated differently in a different software, the normal maps will be broken. That's basically the most important thing. We don't have any animation or other stuff going on here right now. Another thing to make sure you have set right is your units. Make sure the scale isn't being changed to something strange because then it won't line up with your high poly anymore. Okay. Now I can go ahead and import these into Mam Dorbag because these are low poly, I can do them all at once. There's our low poly. Now there's a few parts missing just because like I said earlier, the parts that are either duplicates of each other and I want to unwrap one before I duplicate an instant stem. Yeah, that's pretty much the only parts that are missing. Of course, the hair is missing because I have to make hair cuts and that's very different process to baking regular meshes. So the view pot is a little bit slowed down. It can sort of lag a little bit when I'm trying to rotate the camera. But it's quite usable still. So I'm going to go ahead and keep everything in one file. Again, if it is too slow for you to comfortably work, then you will want to split stuff up into several Mam set tool bank files. Okay, so for baking, you want to click this little toast icon to make a big project. And I'm going to want to set up a bike group for every single material I have. So this is the icon to make a new Bake group. It's not immediately apparent what this does. I remember being frustrated when I was just learning Mama Zip toolbag and I couldn't figure out how to make a bake group. I learned Mam Z tool baag three back then, so the icon was a little bit different there as well. So I need four Bake groups. I don't tend to name these because it's fairly easy to find what you need here. I'm gonna put all the low polies in the low section of the baby groups. Oh, Um, generally, it's okay to pull things out of, hang on. Oh, one thing to note, you can see here that undo takes quite a while in Mama Zip toolbg. Yeah, that's just how it is with Mama zit. It takes forever to undo anything, so, you know, be wary of that and do your best to not mess up and have to undo, I guess. Okay, it's fine to drag sub objects out of these main import objects. This is basically just a placeholder for all of the objects contained in it. But I do prefer to keep everything under that hierarchy if I can. Just to be a little bit more tidy. Of course, it doesn't really matter when you only have one object under this parent object. But for the high polymeshes, I have several or a bunch for some of them. So in those cases, yeah. I generally keep them under that main parent object. But as I'm going to be setting up the By groups, I will have to move some of them out there into another big group to combat stuff like intersecting bakes and clipping and stuff. So just drag the high polymshes into the high sections to, you know, the corresponding ones as well. And in this case, if you remember, I exported the arms later. For now, I'm going to put it with the skin just because that's where the arm mesh is. Later on, I'm going to have to move it somewhere else. And now's a good time to save, because the next thing I'm going to do is bake and, you know, it might crash if you have, like, a scene that's too heavy, just because baking is a little bit of a heavy operation, but it probably won't. So a few things to set up here. You want to take multiple texture sets, so that will make a bake for every single bake group you have in here, and you want to set up your bake output location. I'm going to make a separate folder for bakes. And I like to use PNGs just because I can see the thumbnails. If you're actually working on a project, TJs are a little bit better. That's just the industry standard. But for personal projects, I use PNGs because it lets me see the thumbnails. Okay. And for now, I'm just going to bake out the normal map. And 2048 is probably fine for test Bake. Later on, I'm definitely going to want four Ks for texturing. And 1024 is probably going to be too blurry to really see what's going on, especially when I haven't set up the normal maps efficiently yet because this is just a rough draft. So it's going to take a few minutes for this debate. And I will skip ahead in the footage for when this Oh, it's already done. Okay. And you'll see that nothing has changed with the model, actually. And that's because you have to go in and apply your normal maps. So one thing I'm going to do is you can see that there's a bunch of materials in here. That's because every high polymsh that I imported imports its own material, unfortunately. It's a little bit annoying. I could go through and delete all of them, but it would take a while. So instead, you know, I'll just put up with having to sort through all of these lists. So I'm going to get rid of the specularity on these materials, and you can do that by sending the specular to metal ness. And then dragging the metalness down. A little bit of gloss or roughness is actually preferred. I'm going to be using the roughness metalness workflow. Gloss specula is sort of an older workflow, but it's useful for some things, but it's not something I use, and it's not what I'm going to use in this project. And it can be nice to have a bit of a lower roughness because that picks up highlights a bit better, and it shows off the normal map a bit better. I'm also going to give it a slightly gray material with no color. To import the normal map, just click on normal map here and it's automatically heading to the folder I set up where the bakes go and just click on the corresponding normal map, open it, and our normal app is applied and you can start to see it. I'm going to go through and do this for all the materials. And I'm actually going to keep some metalness on the hard surface parts just because I kind of like that distinction. So metalness generally is a zero or one value. It's kind of unusual and not realistic to have a value in between that. But sometimes you do need to use it for stuff like dusty metal or rusty surfaces, but it really depends. Okay, here is our fully baked character, right? Now, of course, this is a test bake, so none of these bakes are ideal, and they're pretty rough as far as the UVs go. I haven't set up any of the proper baking cage distances and stuff like that. But you can see it's a fairly good result, right? So no major errors to be seen here because I cleared up any sort of overlapping in the UVs. The only issue is that they're kind of inefficient, right? So I could have a significantly higher resolution for what it is here. Now you can see a bit of an issue here where I have the pockets or the little pouches are baking down onto the belts, just because that's how the projection cage works. And that's what different baking groups are for. That's how you stop intersection like this, and that's what I'm going to be covering a little bit more in the next chapter. I'm pretty much going to end this one here, but, you know, I'll give you guys a look at this baked model. Now, this is a low poly, and you can see it pretty much looks like the high poly. That's the magic of normal maps, I guess. I can't see too much of a change on the skin because the normal detail on there is quite subtle, but it's definitely there, right? I can see the poor detail has shown up, and so it's stuff on the lips. Okay, that's pretty good. I guess one more thing I will bake out is the ambient occlusion map. So I'm going to scroll down here and find the ambient occlusion ticket and hit bake again. Now, ambient occlusion takes a little bit longer to bake, so, you know, heads up for that. It's going to bake one for every single material we have, don't worry about that loading bar popping up several times. To apply an ambient occlusion, you want to scroll down to the occlusion tab here and expand it just regular occlusion is fine here and find your corresponding occlusion map. You can see that as a nice little bit of shadowing. Okay, that's it with the ambient occlusion applied. You can see that where behind that pouch, it's completely black because those areas are obviously completely occluded. Amienocclusion does add a nice little bit of extra detail and also it makes areas where the normal map the low poly is clipping through the high poly or what I should say, if the cage isn't quite reaching, those areas will show up in black, so it makes it a little bit easier to identify issues with the bake. But overall, not too bad of a result for a very quick EV map and no tweaking of the baking cage. So I'm pretty happy with this. In the next chapters, I'll be going through the whole process of making sure these UVs are perfect and also doing a pass on the actual low poly to clean up any remaining problem areas where things don't quite work yet in terms of both the topology and how that interacts with baking and the actual normal maps and such. That's all for this one. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 47. 07 Lowpoly Final Polish: Is Chapter seven of UV mapping and baking. So in this chapter and all of the upcoming ones, I'm going to be perfecting the UVs and the bakes of all of these parts that I've tested. Now that I have the test bake, I can take a really good look at it and see which areas are not working and what needs to be tweaked on the low poly or tweaked on the UVs to get it to work properly. I'm going to start with the body because that seems like a pretty easy part. Like I've said before, unwrapping fabrics is easy. Just follow the panel lines. So it's mostly good already. One thing you can see is clipping issues in the bake. This is easily solved by splitting up the low poly into different parts and putting them into different baking groups. It also helps to play with cage distance a little bit, but this is mostly an issue of splitting up the bake into separate parts. Okay. Now, looking at this sleeve hole here, I can see that it's a little bit jagged around the front. You can see that it gets a little bit polygonal there at the front. So I'll definitely want to maybe try and add a few, maybe one or two edge loops there because this is a fairly prominent area. So uh maybe this kind of jagnes is a little bit too much. Again, none of this seems too bad. You don't have to be this obsessive with it. If you have Jagnes like this in your model, it's probably okay in most cases, but I kind of want to make this as good as it can be, so I will be spending a little bit of extra time going through everything. Another thing you'll want to do is, you know, check how things are working with other parts of the model. So you see. So I unhid the accessories there just to check if that top part was visible at all, and it's really not, so I don't really care about the jaggedness up there. And now I'm looking at the actual, you know, arm mesh and how that interacts with this sleeve hole. And you can see it's really jagged the way it clips into the cap. So how I'm going to fix this is probably just by bringing the cap inwards a bit and the low poly of the arm as well. So it's a little bit more hidden, but I may also need to subdivide things a little bit or something like that, maybe add some extra polygons. So I'm going to take a screenshot of that and post that into the URF file as well, just so I remember that issue. The rest of the sleeve hole looks pretty okay. If you go to the top right the viewport, you can turn on your wireframe view, which might be useful for figuring out if certain issues are due to the amount of geometry or maybe just the distribution of edge loops and stuff like that. So it's a useful thing to know. Now, looking at the silhouette here, it can actually be a little bit hard to tell what's going on against this light background if your material is also set to something light. So I'm going to change the color of the background here. So if you head on over to sky and scroll down a bit and in the drop down, set it to color and then set up a sort of bright color that, you know, maybe isn't too bright, where it hurts your eyes. So something like a dark blue, I can really easily see the silhouette here, and I can see that the Bob is a little bit low poly, right? I can see the angles and the polygons here, so I might want to add an edge loop or two to alleviate that. Now, looking at the rest of the silhouette, around the back, it is a little bit jagged, but it's also a less important area, so I'm not going to worry about that too much. Around the front, it looks like there's one point where the geometry sort of pinches inwards. This seems like an easy fix, so I'm going to take a quick screenshot of that and put that in my PureRle and actually, maybe I'll highlight the pinched point just because it's a little bit hard to see in that screenshot. Other than that, this sort of loop or edge of the fabric looks fairly good. But if I go down here a little bit, I can see that this seam looks a little bit rough, right? It's sort of quite angular there, and the thickness of it is very inconsistent, probably just due to lack of polygons. So I'm definitely going to want to have a look at this. Now taking a look at the rest of this stuff, the sort of part where the cloth the free hanging cloth sort of folds over where it meets the body, basically, looks a little bit low poly. I'm not 100% sure if this is worth fixing. Some visible jaggedness or polygons is okay in areas that are sort of crumpled up already, and so they kind of look jagged as it is. Of course, I'm zoomed up really close here. So, you know, this is basically not visible as you zoom out and any sort of Jagnus gets aliased away and sort of smooths out as the polygons get smaller on screen. Anyway, I'm looking at the silhouette here and trying to decide if this is something worth addressing or not. I'm definitely going to have to split off this little fabric panel here. If you can remember it is detached in the geometry. I just have to assign a separate baking group for it so it doesn't clip into the other parts. Looking at the silhouette for the Pi, I could maybe use a few extra polygons for the transition there because it's kind of like a 45 sharp degree angle. So I'll see. I'll just put that in my perforce file just so I can remember to check on it. There's a little hole in the geometry here, so that's going to be something I'll have to check and see if, you know, what's going on there. Probably gone or maybe just a gap there in the geometry left. Looking at the ankles, they look pretty good. I'm going to have to remember to do the top of the zippers, so I'm going to put that in my little perfos foil as well. Just probably going to model in the actual pull part of the zip and put the rest of it into the actual pants. And looking around, in general, this is a fairly good result, almost good enough to be final. You know, aside from the actual way the UV islands are laid out and not straightened out yet. But in terms of geometry and silhouette, it's fairly good. I think the biggest problem area is, you know, around the chest, around that boob that looks a little bit low poly. Everything else is basically fine, from what I can tell here. I'm just going to check if the top of this cape is definitely hidden behind other objects, and it is. So I don't have to worry about that, part being low poly. So, yeah, I have a nice little checklist of things to do in my perforce file, and I'm going to be able to go through that as I'm sort of adjusting and finalizing this low poly object. I feel like this is a really great way to work. So I'm back in three Max, and I have my perfos file right up beside me so I can start working my way through all of these things. I've added an edit polly on top of my unwrapped UVW modifier. And the first thing I'm going to do is look for this little hole near the left knee that I found in marmoset. And this looks like the culprit. Looks like there was just a little hole left there where I forgot to connect up a vertex to the rest of the model. So I'm just going to add a cut and weld that back in, and I can drag that screenshot off to the side or delete it. I just drag it off into a completed pile. Next up is these little zippers. So I didn't model them at all originally, and they bake down to a flat surface, fine. If you have a lower polycot, this is the way you would approach doing zippers like this, bake them down. I have, you know, fairly decent polygon budget in mind, so I can model them in mostly. I'm not going to model the entire thing in. What I'll do is I'll model the little pole parts. As a separate mesh, and then I will model this sort of the sticky out loop part that holds them into the rest of the pants. But I won't model the flat part down in at all, because, you know, it's flat. So that area will bake fine. This little point that sticks out it should bake down to a sort of rectangular mesh just fine. So that's all I'm going to try and get away with for now. If I do bake this and it looks bad or too angular for some reason, although this is a very tiny detail, so I don't think it should. Then I will go in and maybe add one extra edge to sort of round out those corners. But I think this should be fine, especially once the actual pull of the zipper is put on top of it. I should look plenty complex enough. Going to move the ends in a little bit just to make it less of a right angle. So to slightly make the sort of angles a little bit more shallow, which will help it look a bit less like a rectangle, even though that's not the exact shape of the low poly. Firstly, I can get away with this because this is such a tiny mesh that any sort of issues with the bake being slightly deformed or something like that, I can basically get away on a tiny mesh like this where it wouldn't really be visible, so I mean, I'm not entirely sure how this will pan out yet, but I'll see once I go ahead and test bake this again. So this is all I'm going to try and do for the end pieces here. And as I'm doing this, I'm sort of realizing that, you know, the original plan for this whole set of materials was to have no metalness maps here, and these zippers are probably going to be metal. You can have plastic zippers, but usually it's nice to have a shiny little bit of metallic detail in these areas. So I probably will want to keep these metallic. Again, I would have to check the concept as well for what's in mind there. So I may have to, you know, split these up again somehow or just add a mental wellness map to this material set. It seems a little bit wasteful to add an entire texture, an entire extra grayscale texture to this set of objects or this material, just for these zippers. So I am going to have to see, you know, if there's a way to split these up more efficiently. Um, is one of those things that, you know, it's not hugely important on a personal project, but it does show a degree of understanding and professionalism. So I'm going to try and go for that. This is something that is, you know, when you're rendering a single character in Mamzet for your own portfolio, it does not make a difference in terms of performance or how things look at all. But, you know, if you're trying to get a job at a studio, you know, optimizing things like this is, you know, it shows that you know what you're doing. Uh, now for the little zip polls, I'm going to make them really low poly because they're tiny. It's not ideal that I have to work with the low poly being as decimated as it is here. You know, it's a little bit hard to tell what the actual shape of these is meant to be in the high poly. So what I'm going to do is head into Moms toolbg and take a look at the high poly there. Again, this is only an issue because I decimated the low poly or the high poly a little bit too much before exporting to three S MAX when it comes to a little detail like this. So maybe if you decimated it a little bit less, then, you wouldn't have to go in and compare it to the actual ie poly. I could avoid this just by exporting the low poly decimated, you know, slightly less or re exporting just these little pools as a reference hi poly object, but I don't want to go through the hassle of opening up cprush and doing all that again. So I'm just going to roughly eyeball Again, not ideal, but on a mesh, this tiny, eyeballing stuff and working a little bit roughly is I think I can probably get away with this, right? Just because it's so tiny, you know, there if it's slightly wonky and which it kind of is here, you can see that it's not entirely straight on a lot of these faces. But because this subject is so small, I think I can get away with it just fine. So that's what I'm going to do. Now, the backside of the zipper pull is, you know, very non planar, very wonky. So I'm going to use the make planar button in the editiometry tab to sort of make it a plane and then hopefully rotate it into the correct orientation. That will make this object look a little bit more even and less like it was done freehand, basically. And hopefully this is good enough. I'm not 100% sure on leaving the little hole in the middle there as a rectangle. No 100% sure how that will bake out yet. If it does turn out to look pretty rough once it's baked, then I will go through and adjust it. Before I duplicate this zipper across to the other side, I'm going to do a quick unwrap for it. This is going to be basically the final unwrap for a part like this because it's so tiny and so simple, it doesn't really need anything extra done to. And this should be good enough. So I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this to the other side of the pants. I sort of messed up a little bit when I was trying to duplicate this to the other side. At first, I tried symmetry because I was hoping that maybe both zippers were in the exact same position on either side. And that's only because I'm not the one that made this high polymesh, so I wasn't sure exactly what was used. And I was hoping that maybe it was just a matter of symmetry, but clearly, it isn't in different positions on either side. So then I tried to detach the, you know, symmetrical left but what I accidentally did was I had both of them selected, and I used detached Clone. So what happened was I basically just duplicated both of the objects. So then to fix that, I deleted the symmetry modifier on the original one. And for the duplicated one, I applied the symmetry modifier and deleted the right zipper. And from there, I just moved it into position manually, and I used that little trick of putting the pivot pot on one corner of the object so that you can sort of precisely maneuver it into position over the high poly. Then I attach them back to each other, which, in hindsight, I probably could have just applied symmetry and moved this one around by itself. And then I applied the same material that the rest of the pants have. I'm actually not sure what material these zippers are going to end up with. In the end, I may have to move them to a different material group later on. But that's the part basically done for now. Now I'm going to move on to the next area of this low poly. So I'm going to isolate the body again, and right before I move on, I remembered that I need to rename the zipper object. And I'm going to drag it into the layer with all of the rest of the low poly objects as well. And in the perforce file, I'll drag that screenshot off into the finished pile, as well. Now, moving on to this side seam, I can see that, yeah, it's definitely lacking some geometry here, and it's making this sort of edge seem quite uneven because, you know, it's too low poly to follow that edge very consistently and smoothly. So in some areas, it's making it wider where it's concave, and in convex areas, it's sort of skimming off the top and making it thinner. So it's quite uneven and doesn't look great, really. I'm going to turn on showcage so I can see my wireframe and turn off wireframe mode and still see my wireframe, and then I'll hide the other parts of the body. Now, unfortunately, hiding them does not hide their wireframes in showcage mode, so that's a little bit annoying, but I don't want to detach them right now. If it really is getting in the way for you, feel free to detach them and then reattach them. It's not really a huge issue. At this bottom vertex, I couldn't really move around too much without causing a lot of clipping through the pants. That's just sort of how the hi polly is set up, so I left that one where it is. The other ones, the first thing I'm going to try is moving around the existing geometry to follow the curve of this seam before I start to add extra edges because I really don't want to add too many extra edges and make the polygon density of this model very inconsistent. There's already a few extra edges added in this area, and, you know, adding many more would look very inconsistent and yeah. Moving around the existing geometry to sort of better fit the curves, basically, you know, moving the existing edge loops closer to the actual curved parts and spreading them out across areas where it's mostly straight does a lot to help with the shape of this before it wasn't really ideal. But at the end of the day, I am going to have to add one or two extra edges just because this is a pretty complex curve that goes in and out a few times, and you just need that extra geometry for all of these tight curves. I'm adding an extra edge down the middle of this little crest in that fold that seem, just because it's convex, so it really sticks out in the silhouette and it's very apparent that this area is kind of a low poly. At least that's how I remember it when I was looking at it in Mamas. Also, there's a little bit of an overhang in the fabric here, so I thought I might model that in and that will sort of help distinguish these two layers or really make it come across that they're separate objects stitched together as opposed to, you know, everything being baked down into one surface. It'll really make it read as sort of two separate layers of fabric, I think. So that's why I modeled that in. And I think it does help a little bit. One thing to remember is that normal maps don't cast shadows. So, you know, even though you could normal map this area down just fine, it wouldn't really cast a shadow on itself, which is why sometimes it's nice to sort of model stuff like this in. Again, this is very subtle, so these are things that are very essential. I also turned the sort of end triangle into a quad here to make it the transition from where, you know, it blends back into sort of single surface and the overhang stops, at least in the low polymodel make that transition a little bit smoother by making that a quad and not just a sharp triangle. I'm also noticing a few engons here that I'm going to clean up very quickly. I left quite a few. I'm remembering that that I forgot to do or I just chose not to do a full pass on the whole model and making sure to get rid of every single engon. So that's something I'm going to have to do a little bit later as well. But right now I want to finish the task at hand. Which is this sort of seam. I'm going to add one more edge up here because there's a sort of very tight curve here as well that you can see just doesn't have enough edge or vertex information to carry it. So adding one more extra edge seems to have fixed that issue. And I feel like this whole area is looking a little bit better now and it's probably good enough to be the final result. So this edge or this seam is pretty much done. I'll move a few of these vertices around that I feel like aren't quite in the right spot, and now we'll move on to cleaning up some of these gons. This triangle, I thought seemed a little bit too small to be necessary. But once I got rid of it, I realized that maybe it was kind of helping with the geometry in that area because putting the vertex at the top there didn't really make sense, and putting it at the bottom wasn't quite working either just because of sort of curvature of that area. So I just decided to leave it as it was. Now moving on to the front of this curve. I added a bit of extra geometry while getting rid of an gone here. This isn't entirely necessary. I feel like maybe this patch ended up a tiny bit too dense compared to other areas. Nothing major here, really, but still, this part maybe wasn't an essential thing to fix, but since I was always ready here, and I did end up fixing it, I just went with it. Again, this spot wasn't really broken in the first place, but I ended up defining the sort of curvature of that fold anyway, a little bit more with some extra geometry. So I'm taking a good look at the silhouette here, and maybe I kind of want to alleviate a little bit of the angularenss of this little fold in this area. Now, it's not too extreme, I feel like, but I thought I might be able to get it a little bit better if I move some of these edges upwards a little bit closer to the actual curved part. And over here, I just also have a few engons I need to clean up. Now, towards the back side of the character, I'm not as concerned about the jagginss just because there's obviously going to be less renders of the back of the character because that's always less interesting. And there's also a cape covering over there and a bunch of other stuff. So yeah, a less important area gets less attention, basically. And I'm wiggling my camera a lot just to check, you know, the silhouette and the actual shapes going on here. And trying to find ways to neatly clean up some of these engons or triangulate out some of these areas where I have a lot of geometry that needs to sort of go back into the regular quads of the surface. And that's all for that seam area. Now, going up here, there was a little bit of a pinch in this area. So I'm going to try and get rid of it by moving some of these vertices around a little bit. So it looks to me like the back vertex was pushed forward a little bit, maybe, and that was making this area a little bit thinner than the rest. That's probably not what's causing the actual sort of visible angle in this area, or I'm calling it pinching for some reason. That's probably just a lack of geometry in this area. So I cut in an extra little edge here, and I'm moving it into the right position. Um some of these changes, I'm sort of doing freehand and not using the free form drag tool to conform to the surface because it's a little bit quicker to move stuff into position just manually with the gizmo rather than using drag tool for everything. But, you still want to conform to the high poly in order to get a good bake. This is looking a lot better than it did before. I might just move around some of these vertices a little bit more before I call this area finished. A nice way to check if an added edge is really contributing to the silhouette or not is just to select it and use controlled backspace to delete it, and then you can undo and then redo it a few times to check if it's really contributing to the silhouette or not. In this case, I decided it was making enough of a contribution to be able to stay there. Now, moving on to the sleeve hole, I'm going to move the entire cap inwards a bit because what I saw in the Mum's et file was that the way the actual skin of the shoulder intersects with this cap was really jagged and visible and ugly. So I'm going to have to move that whole intersection inwards a bit to hide that entirely. But I'm probably going to have to spend a little bit more time on figuring out the internal cap once I get to doing the final bakes on the arm as well, because I'm going to have to adjust the skin portion of the arm for that area as well, because it needs a little bit more length to it in order to fill out that gap. So now moving on to the actual edge here. It's not ideal that I have imported the high poly with all of the parts attached. I'm probably going to have to detach it later on so I can finalize this area then. I am going to have to add a loop or two in order to make this area a little bit smoother, like I wanted. Theresn' really no other way around it. I start just cutting in a triangle up here. That's one way to round out these areas like this. You can just cut in triangles near the very edge. That's what I did for the top of the gloves and stuff like that. That's a very common way to fix these issues. It's not exactly something I want to do for here because I feel like I have almost much geometry as it is, and I might just pull an edge loop all the way through the front of the chest because there is definitely a little bit of missing geometry there as well that I need to add in order to complete the roundness in that area. But as you can see, a single edge can sort of help round stuff out a little bit more than you would expect. Yeah. But now looking at the silhouette of the chest or the boobin profile. I can see that it's definitely a little bit too jagged. Same as I saw in Mom's Tolbag really. So I'm trying to figure out where to put this extra edge loop, or I might have to add two, actually. And I can see that there's sort of the start of an edge loop down here. So what I might just do is just sort of cut that through the rest of the body and turn it into a complete edge loop instead of just having it finished here in the middle of the torso. So I just use the cut tool. And I'm going to cut across to where the end of this layer of fabric, where it has that, you know, bottom layer of fabric starts. And that's because the curvature is a lot less significant there, so I don't really need to pull this edge loop all the way through to the sleeve hole, I don't feel like. But I'll see once I get this area done. I end up having a little bit of lag here. So, if the camera and the mouse is jumping around a bit on screen, that's just because I've cut out areas where my PSCs, you know, just the screen is frozen for a second. It's probably a good idea to close stuff like Maze toolbg or whatever other heavy software you might have running in the background because it can really slow down the speed at which you're working if, you know, three DS Max or whatever program you're using is being unresponsive. I can get really annoying and just frustrating and. So I'm just using the conform move tool to sort of spread out and distribute these polygons a little bit better. In general, I want more polygons where it's more curved, obviously, because I need to define those curves. So I might pull up some up from the bottom where it's more flat and some down from the top where it's also more flat. Another nice trick to know is that you can turn on flat colour shading in order to get a similar effect to what I was doing in Mans Torbeg where, you know, when it's just flat colors and no shadows, it's very easy to see the silhouette and if anything looks jagged or not. So that's another nice thing that you might want to use. Going to use the drag tool to make sure these new vertices I added are positioned correctly on that, you know, edge. It's very important to line up your vertices on edges like this because that's where normal baking issues are going to be most apparent on flat areas. You know, you can bake pretty much anything down to a plane without issue, but on edges or, you know, little steps in height, that's where these issues are most prominent. You need to be careful and make sure your vertices are well lined up with areas like that. So looking at this, this is looking quite good, but I feel like I need one more extra edge here. I'm running into that issue from before where the conform tools sort of clip through to the backside of the mesh when you have a two layered mesh, it's a little bit annoying, but I don't want to spend all that time reimporting stuff right now because reimporting takes a little bit of a while, so I'm sort of struggling through with this i polymsh here. So I'm moving all of this geometry down because I'm going to be adding another edge loop to the top. So that's another thing you can do. If there's a very convenient area where you can add an edge loop without sort of disrupting the existing geometry, but it's a little bit further away than where you need it. You can sort of move all of the other edge loops down a bit and then add that edge loop up in there. I'm detaching the main fabric parts just so I can isolate them and see what I'm doing a lot better. And here's where I'm going to be adding that extra edge loop. Again, it's not exactly in the area where I have that lack of geometry, which is a little bit lower down. But what this lets me do if I put an extra edge loop here is move all of the loops around it downwards into that area where I do need it. So yeah, if you see a really good opportunity to add an edge loop, but it's a little bit off from the exact area where you need it, remember that you can use that as an opportunity to sort of move the surrounding geometry down as you make space for that extra edge loop. So this extra Eg Lupe sort of worked its way into the existing geometry really well, and I haven't messed up the flow of my polygons at all or anything like that. And I think this will be enough to sort of round out the silhouette. You can see it's much better compared to what it was. And in silhouette or, you know, flat color view, it definitely looks good enough to me right now. I don't want to make it too dense compared to, you know, all of the surrounding geometry. I want to keep things, you know, pretty consistent. I feel like I could squeeze a little bit more out of the existing geometry if I moved around some of the edge loops down lower a bit to that area where there's the most curvature. So that's what I'm doing now, using the conform move brush and then the conform relax brush to sort of smooth everything out after it gets, you know, squirhed around a bit by the conform move brush. And now from a top view, it also looks pretty good. So I think I'm pretty happy with the silhouette now. So I'm going to call all of the edits that pertain to, you know, parts that affect the silhouette basically done. And I'll move on to just fixing engons and little errors that I find like that. And I won't really spend any more time trying to fix the set because I think it's at a pretty good point now. So I'm just detaching these remaining parts of the vest from the main high poly object to the rest of the vest because I sort of forgot to select them earlier when I was detaching them. And now I can work in isolation mode with just the low poly and the high poly of the vest here, which is a little bit more convenient. For some reason, these two vertices were moved down a little bit. And also, I have some surplus vertices in this area just because, um if you can remember, this part was attached to, you know, the mechanical part of the torso, and there's a little bit of, like, panel line detail there, and I had to cut in a few edges to accommodate those panel lines and stuff like that in that area. So that's why there was an extra edge cut in there, and I don't need that anymore because I've detached the main part of the torso. What I'm using to see all of my engons here is, if you go to the selection tab and to the very left of the selection tab ribbon, there is a selection mode that will select by the number of edges. So you can set that to equals less than or more than, and it will select less or equals or more than the specified value you put in there. If you put four in and select more than four, then it will show you all of the engons on your mesh. It will basically select them. That selection mode also depends on what selection mode you are in. So make sure you're in Face mode when you're using that. And when you're in Face mode, it will select all of the faces with more than four sides, and that's an easy way for you to find engons in your mesh. And then you can go go into Vertex mode to fix them and then go back into Face Mode to see them again. Of course, it won't update your selection as you go. So if you want to update your selection after you've fixed a bunch of things, you'll have to go back to the selection tab, reselect faces with more than four edges, and then you can check for engons again like that. And yeah, it's a really useful way of finding and getting rid of them. And sometimes it makes sense to cut across a few polygons to get rid of an endgon if all the directions you can triangulate and don't really make a lot of sense, or if there's a really handy point you can cut to that's quite close by. For example, here, I'm going to cut across to the next polygon over, and that sort of forms a nice sort of edge loop there. That makes a little bit more sense than just cutting into one of the corners of the endgon that I had there. Yeah, take your time on this. Don't just blindly cut things across to just quickly get rid of them. You do want it to make sense when you get rid of all of your engons. There is the option of using turn to poly and setting the maximum side number 24. And yeah, that will automatically get rid of all of your polygons, but it's basically the same result as if you just triangulated things on export. So, you know, there's no real way of knowing which direction it's going to triangulate in and if it will pick the best direction to do it in. Or the one that you want. And of course, you can always check everything after you apply a turn to poly to get rid of all of the engons. But it's just going to be a lot harder to see issues that you don't like because you won't be able to highlight the former engons and you won't be sort of able to check each and every one of them because they'll just get lost with all of the other polygons. So it's something I prefer to do manually, unless I know I have a bunch of engons that will be easy to solve for the turn to polymodifier. But most of the time I do it annually. So this area is a little bit tricky just because of the way I have that top layer of fabric that comes into sort of comes together with the bottom layer of fabric, and it's kind of tricky to figure out a way to solve this area without leaving a long thin triangle, which is something you want to avoid long thin triangles. Um, long thin quads aren't really much better because that's just two triangles next to each other. So yeah, I sort of play around with a bunch of different configurations. What I have on screen here is, you know, like a quad, but two of the vertices are very close to each other. That's also not much better than a long thin triangle because no matter which way it was to triangulate, you would end up with a long thin triangle again. So what I settle on eventually is just moving that vertice outwards a little bit. Just so that triangle isn't super thin, it's a little bit wider here, and this sort of gets across the shape of the object well enough, as well. So that's what I end up settling. And now I move onto the front. Some of these vertices have ended up trapped underneath because they snapped to a lower layer, so I'm just going to use the push brush to push them above the surface and then conform them back down. So just setting the size quite low and the intensity very low, so they only go just above the surface so I can use the relaxed conform brush to bring them back down. Now moving on to these engons on the back area. Just carrying on and doing the same things I did for all the ever gns basically. Again, this triangle that goes straight down doesn't really look ideal, so I'm going to go through and maybe tweak some of the surrounding topology to get it to work with all this other stuff. And there's another endgon up here I have to sort. And I also noticed that down here in this area, it also looks a little bit jagged, just the entire sleeve area. So what I might do is I might extend or just cut another edge loop into that area and then maybe feed one of the engons into it as well. So I cut in an extra edge here, and now I'm going to move the surrounding edges around a bit to sort of space stuff out more evenly and get more out of that geometry when it comes to sort of getting the curvature across. This very bottom part is where the curvature is most extreme and where the topology should be the most dense. But also, this isn't a hugely important area because it is underneath the arm, and it's fairly uncommon for your arm to be, you know, at something like a 90 degree angle, right? At the most, it's 45 degrees, even when you're doing stuff. It's actually pretty uncommon for arms to be extended upwards all that much. So, this isn't a hugely important area, so I'm not going to dump a whole load of topology in here just to make it look a tiny bit more round. So that one extra edge loop should do it, and then also shifting everything around a little bit to sort of maximize the usage of that topology as well. And once that's done, just moving these vertices around a little bit to fit those surrounding folds as well, cutting that edge in just to make sure this quad triangulates along the direction of that fold instead of in some other direction. Now there's some more straightforward engons down here that really are just in a matter of, you know, cutting across to the other side of the angona turn it i 48. 08 Straightning Uv Islands: So I'm just in Mama Zep tool Bank so I can check if what I did, these little tweaks for the topology are working. You can see that MamaztTolbag automatically re Imports your meshes. If you don't want it to reimport them for some reason, automatically, there is a little checkbox here for auto reload. And if for some reason, it hasn't Auto reloaded, you can also click the reload button. But generally, as soon as you save over the file that's already been imported, it will update it in here. So taking a look, uh, the little bumps from the zipper. I feel like they do add that tiny little bit of extra to the silhouette. They don't look too angular when they're this small, so that's good. And I think they'll pop a little bit more and they'll be quite nice once the colors are added. I forgot to add the ends of the zippers to the import. Now, all of the UVs here are the same as the old ones. So I haven't rebaked anything. The reason why they work after I edited the mesh a little bit is because the changes weren't significant enough to break the UVs. But, you know, in areas where the bake is affecting maybe the way things look, maybe this isn't an ideal test, and I should actually re bake things. You can see that here, the normals have gotten a little bit messed up from my edits. So I'm just going to mainly look at the shot here. I think this is better than what it was before. I think this is probably going to be fine over here. And I think I'll leave these bell parts as they are. At the end of the day, this is a real time model. And you are going to have some faceting in some areas. So but you just sort of just have to recognize where it looks very angular and bad or where that sort of faceting fits the existing shape. I think this is pretty good for now. Especially once the other parts get added in, it will look even, you know, more smooth. Generally, you know, especially with this high contrast background, I can't see too much angularss. So I think I'm going to go with this and I'll see you know, if something really jumps out at me later on, then I will go ahead and address it. But for now, I think this is actually pretty good. So what I'll do is I'll clean up the UVs now and I'll do a proper final bake and see how that looks. So I'm back in three MAX. The third thing I'm going to do is rename all of the different parts of the low poly body. This is just to make it a little bit easier for me to set up the baking groups in MamasaTolbg. Since if I name them correctly, I'll know which parts to put in which baking group, especially when I re import stuff, and I have to redo the baking groups. So with those names, I'm going to select all of the low poly objects, making sure not to select anything I don't need. And I'm going to apply the unwrap UVW modified to all of them at once. So this applies the modifier to all of the objects together, and it lets you work on them together, even though they are still separate objects. This is a nice setup because it lets you work with each object individually, as well, so you can go in and isolate them and work on them by themselves. But also you can work on all of them together when it comes to the UVs. So this sort of gives you the best of both worlds. I'm going to be using the Pell Mode tool to straighten out my UV islands here. Now, I'm recording this little walk through of how to use the PLM tool and all of the different buttons and functions separately because I noticed I didn't have anything like that in my main tutorial, so don't be alarmed that everything on screen has sort of changed a little bit here. So here's how you use the tool. The first thing I do is usually detach and pack are turned on by default, so I usually turn both of those off. If you have detached turned on, what that will do is it will only peel the selected faces that you have selected when you click Peel Mode, and that's not very useful because I already have my UVs split up the way I want them at this point, and I don't want to split them up anymore. So I turn off detached most of the time. And I also turn off PAC, because what PAC will do is when you turn on P mode, it will try and pack the selected UV island, which also isn't very useful because I'm not at the packing stage yet. Right now, I just want to straighten out my UV islands. So I turn both of those off, and the other thing I do is I head into this little drop down menu here and set it to LSCM instead of unfold. And this is a slightly older form of the tool, which gives you a lot more manual control basically what it does is it lets you pin vertices and move around and manipulate your UV island this way. So the way you want to work with the Peel Mode tool is select the UV island you want to work on. Select all of the faces in that UV island and then click Peel Mode, and it will put you into Peel mode. All of your edges turn purple and you will get two pinned vertices automatically. Now, if you head into Vertex mode and you're in move mode, every time you move one of those pinned vertices around, it changes the islands rotation and scale and shape in relation to the other pinned vertices. And with auto pinned moved vertices turned on by default, if I just select another vertice and start moving around, it will also get pinned and sort of start changing the shape of the UV island in relation to the other pins around it. And using this, I can change the UV Island's shape to however I want it. Now, if you put a pin in the wrong place and it's ruining the rest of your UV island, you can just click unpinned selected vertice, and it will unpin it, but it won't automatically update. To automatically update, you'll have to click on a vertice and maybe even move it around a little bit, and then it will update the UV island. A similar issue is, if you rotate or scale a vertex, they won't get pinned automatically. Pin automatically only works with moving vertices. So I'm going to scale these up and you can see the rest of the UV. They didn't get pinned or anything. So if I want to pin them, I just click Pin selected, and that also won't auto update, so you'll need to click on a vertice in order to get them to update. And that's pretty much all of the different functions of the Peel Mode tool. Peel mode is specifically the little option in the middle here. The other ones are quick Peel. So yeah, I'm going to be using Peel mode for this. And that's pretty much all of the different functions. The other thing to look out for is if you're in edge mode, what edge mode does when you're in Peel mode is it starts to split up your UV island along the selected edges, which I don't find very useful either because I've already got my UV island split up the way I want it. So that's all there is to peel mode. Now I can head back into the main tutorial footage. So here I am back in the main tutorial footage. And I'm going to start by working on the scarf or the cape, whatever you want to call it just because that's a nice and easy piece to work on as a sort of introduction to using the Peel tool to straighten out your UV islands. Next thing I'm going to do is head to options and preferences and change the checker tiling to double. That's just to make the grid a little bit smaller in my UV editor so that I can more easily align vertices vertically and horizontally using that grid. And now I'm going to enter Peel mode on this UV island. Here I am in Peel mode. And the first thing I'm going to do is use that grid to align the top and the bottom corners vertically and also horizontally with each other. And that's so I can straighten out the sides of the UV island. So once the top and bottom corners are aligned horizontally and vertically, I'm going to add a few more pins just to straighten out the sides a little bit. This part isn't essential. It just makes it a little bit easier to select with the box tool. The box selection tool. If they're more or less straight, I can just drag along the side and select all of the vertices that make up the sides. But there's other ways you can select the sides as well. Now here I use the scale horizontal tool in order to get them all straighten out in line. And that's not actually the best way to do this. There's actually a horizontal and vertical alignment tool that does this for you. If you use a scale tool, it won't auto pin those vertices. So then you can either use the move tool to move them around a little bit to pin them or manually pin them. But much better than using the scale tool is to use the align horizontal and align vertical tools in the quick Transform panel, which I'm using them now. And those ones do get auto pinned. So yeah, I would suggest using those instead of the scale tool. I just sort of forgot they existed for a second there, and that's why I used the scale tool. But the align horizontal and align vertical tools under the quick Transform panel to the right of the UV editor is much better for that, so I would advise using those. And that's this UV island pretty much done. I've straightened out the top and the bottom and both sides and basically aligned them to the pixel grid. Now, what I mean by pixel grid is all of the pixels in a texture sort of go into a grid, right? So you have all of the pixels going horizontally and all of the pixels going vertically. So it's a grid just like the one on this UV checker basically, just a lot smaller or depending on your texture size. And if you align the borders of your UV islands to that grid, you'll have very nice and crisp UV island edges in your bakes and in your textures, which are perfectly aligned to that pixel grid. You won't have any sort of pixel stepping or aliasing in your textures because all of the edges of your islands basically go along with the pixels. So if they're not going diagonally across the pixel grid, you won't have any sort of issues with stepping or aliasing along the borders of your UVs. And that can be a nice thing to have. Now, it's not essential, so you don't need to force every single one of your UE islands into a rectangle or a square in order to get it to align with a pixel grid. But it's something to keep in mind for very important and visible areas or for the types of UV islands that are very easy to turn into a rectangle. For example, this scarf, it's super easy to turn it into a complete rectangle and align it to the pixel grid that way. Now, you can use the grow oops tools down at the bottom of the UV editor to select the edges of your UV islands as well. So that's if you don't want to use the box select tool. That's another option you have, but it won't work so well if you have triangles along your UV borders because it stops every time it reaches a triangle because, you know, then it can't detect the loop continuing. So that's something to keep in mind with that button down there. But either way, make your selections of the UV borders and then use the line horizontal or a line vertical. If you have an issue where a line horizontal is sort of squashing your edge into the rest of the UV island, because the way it works is it takes the average position of every vertice when it straightens them out. So if that island is sort of curved, then the average position will sort of be inside of the rest of the UV island, which isn't something you might want exactly. And then you can just use the move horizontal tool to move it out of the rest of the UV island if you have that issue. That's the front and back pretty much done. I can exit Peel mode if I want to. Just going to save the file really quickly as well. And that's these UV islands done. So these two UV islands are pretty much done. I do spend a few minutes tweaking things and sort of slightly adjusting them here, but it's not super important. The first thing I do is I try and line up the width of them, so they're both the same exact width. In hindsight, there's no real reason to do this. At the time, I was sort of thinking ahead for when I was going to pack all of the UV islands together. And I thought if I make them the same width, then I might save some, you know, texture space, make it a little bit more efficient if they're the same width, in case I line up a very long piece next to them. If you imagine one is more narrow than the other, then I might end up with a very thin gap between part of the, you know, UV island that has been lined up next to them that isn't very usable for anything, and it's sort of just basically wasted space. But that kind of space wastage isn't really a huge impact if, you know, I scale an island horizontally, one or 2%, right? So, you know, it's probably not something you want to spend your time on. But sometimes, you know, you sort of fall into the rabbit hole of doing something unnecessarily. The other little thing I'm tweaking here is the very corners of this UE map, just making sure that there's not too much distortion going on here. Now, these are very small parts, so it's not super important that you clean these up because they probably won't make a visible impact on your bakes if they're very slightly distorted. And even if they are distorted, they'll probably bake down fine. But if you have time or if you do your bake and you do notice some distortion around the corners, then it's definitely something you can try and fix. Basically, what I did here was I increased the scale of my texted checker just so there's more detail in that corner to where I can actually see what's going on in terms of distortion in that area. And then I just wiggle the vertices around that corner and see what produces the least distortion. That's generally how you fix issues in corners like this, right? Make sure your UV texture checker is tiled to an extent where you can see a line or a letter or something like that near your problem area. If it's too big, then you might just have a blank flat color in that area, which doesn't really give you any information. So you want it to be at a scale where you can see some detail there, some sort of lines or letters, and then just pick up each verticee around that problem area and wiggle it around and see what gives you the straightest line or the least distorted letter and stuff like that. Another thing you can do is move your UV island around so that you have some sort of detail in that corner where you have the problem. But, yeah, that's sort of how you fix little issues in corners and stuff. Now I'm also straightening out some of the internal edges of the UV island. Again, that's not something that's essential, and it's only something I do for very straight parts that are easy to do this for or have very little internal distortion. Um, Basically, the reason is the same as for why you want to align the edges of your UV islands to the pixel grid. If you align up the internal details of your object to the pixel grid, as well, you also won't get any stepping or stuff like that in your bakes. But in this case, you know, it's pretty much optional. It won't make a huge impact on your final result. So if you don't want to do it, then you can skip. So, yeah, there's the cape done. Now I can move on to some of the other parts. So the next part I'm going to do is the loose hanging part of that sort of cloth square that there is. So the bottom half here of and this part doesn't strictly fit into a rectangle like the cape does, right? I sort of has straight sides, but the top half sort of bends inwards a little bit and then gets wider towards the ends. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to line up the external parts of this UV island to the grid. So the two sides and the bottom half. And then the top half, I won't be stretching it out in order to fix the pixel grid because that would sort of distort any sort of fabric texture I apply to it, right? And that's not something I want. So I'm only going to be lining up the bottom edge. You can see I'm doing here. And then the top corners, I'm also going to align vertically. And once this is more or less straightened out with a few pins, I'm going to go ahead and use the vertical and horizontal alignment tools to make sure they're 100% straight. Now, those corners, I'm going to also have to give them a tiny bit of extra attention to make sure that they're not too squashed because there is a little bit of a detail in the corner parts that I want to make sure doesn't end up distorted in the bakes. So here I am sort of trying to straighten them out. And another thing to look out for is to not place too many pins because at that point, you're pretty much manipulating every single vertice individually if you put too many pins in an area. So for this sort of edge detail, where there's a sort of little fabric label or something like that stitched onto the corner of this part, I'm trying to straighten it out, so the sort of edges of it are straight, like I see them in the three D viewport. And hopefully that will minimize any sort of visible distortion or distortion in any sort of painting I do on top of it in substance pain. And now I'm horizontally aligning the bottom edge and vertically aligning the sides. That's this UV island pretty much done, but I'm also going to align some of these internal edges as well because I may as well, it seems quite an easy thing and it will get rid of any distortion I have for that internal seam. So I just select two vertices, and then I use the grow loop selection button a few times to grow the selection out to however many I want. And in this case, I'm using the vertical align, and for the horizontal parts, I use the horizontal align, and that straightens out all of these edges pretty much perfectly. And I can sort of use the move tool to pin and move some of these vertical out so they're completely straight. All straightforward. Same stuff I did for the first part. And these are pretty much going to be the only tools I need to straight out all of the remaining UV islands. Now, for this island and the islands of the scarf or the cape, they're still fairly rectangular. So a lot of this stuff I can align horizontally and vertically. But for per parts, there's a lot less of that, right? So in those cases, you know, you simply can't align things vertically or horizontally. In which case, you just sort of need to mainly look out for optimizing for angle distortion and stuff like that. So I'm spending a little bit more time tweaking this corner area. Areas like this are sort of a hot spots of trouble just because there's a little bit more distortion going on here. You know, I sort of have to flatten out an area that's a lot more twisted than all of the flat surfaces of this UV island. So that's why areas like this need a little bit more attention to make sure you don't end up with any issues in areas like this. But in general, this spot isn't too bad. Yeah, just scale up your texture checker accordingly and wiggle these isease around. They don't have to be the texture checker grid doesn't have to come out completely straight. A little bit of distortion is fine. Um, you also need to keep in mind what you're going to be doing with that area in substance painter. If it's very distorted, then you won't be able to paint on that area in the two D view, but you can still project to that area from the three D just fine. And as long as you're projecting from three D view, it will sort of, you know, ignore that distortion because it's projecting from three D, but it won't work so well from the two D view or if you want to apply some sort of tiling pattern to that area, it will also be kind of distorted unless you can use some sort of planar mapping or triplanar mapping in that area. But usually, it's a lot more convenient to just use tiling textures mapped to the UVs instead of a planar map. So yeah, if it's an area where you want some sort of tiling texture, then you need to pay a lot more attention to straightening and flattening stuff out. But if it's not an area like that, then you don't have to worry about the distortion too much. Generally, a little bit of distortion is okay. At the end of the day, we are flattening out a three D object into two D space. And it is going to be distorted in some way unless you split off every single polygon into its own island. That would be the only way to avoid 100% of distortion because whenever you're flattening out something three D into two D space, you are sort of squashing it and spreading it out in a certain way regardless of what you're doing. So yeah, especially with substance painter, some distortion or stretching in your UV islands is okay, and it's completely acceptable. And yeah, it's normal. So that's that UV island done. Now I'm going to do the sort of one that's for the underside. Now, parts that are hidden like this, like the underside of this cloth piece, of course, they are a lot less important, so you can spend less time on them and pay less attention to them. You can also scale them down smaller in your UV I'm not really going to do that for this one because it might still be kind of visible, and I am going to be applying some sort of tiling fabric texture to this, right? And it sort of has to match the tiling fabric of the part that's above it, right? Because these are two interconnected UV islands. So yeah, I'm going to try to not have them differently scaled too much in this case. But yeah, all I did for that one really is straighten out the sides and the bottom. I was really quick for those parts. Now I'm going to move on to this torso piece. So the third thing I'm going to do is detach the cap area or, you know, the cap that is over this shoulder hole from the rest of this UV island. I pretty much always detach the caps from the UV islands just so I can scale them down to be smaller than all of the other UVs. And that's because caps don't really need a lot of UV space. And I'm just using this by going into edge mode while I'm in peel mode. And like I mentioned, in that little walk through at the start, being in edge mode, whenever you select an edge, it automatically splits it. But sometimes it's a little bit annoying to work this way, especially if it's if you double click and you accidentally select an edge loop, it's a little bit annoying. So eventually I just switch out of Peel mode and just detach that island with the regular Explode tool. So yeah, I don't usually like using edge mode to split stuff a part one when I'm in Peel mode. So for fabric, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but you want to split it up along the seams that are on the fabric. You know, there's basically no reason not to do that. For one, it sort of maintains the integrity of any sort of tiling fabric texture you're going to apply to it, because this is basically how the fabric would be split up in real life. So by splitting up your UV islands in the same way, it's the best way to achieve a realistic result. Especially if you made your hi poly in Marvelous designer, in which case, all of your seams are basically physically accurate. So whenever you unwrap a UV this way, you'll have pretty much no distortion as long as you cut along the seams because, you know, it's sort of going off of that physically accurate shape that you had in Marvelous Design. If you're using a hand sculpted fabric with no simulation involved, then you sort of have to pay attention to where you're putting your seams and sort of think about where they would be in real life or use lots of reference and stuff like that. Because if you don't place enough seams or if you put them in the wrong places, you can sort of end up with a piece of fabric that is physically impossible, and in which case, unwrapping it might be a little bit harder or you might have a little bit more distortion, just because you don't have seams in the right places to, you know, be able to flatten that object out properly. But, um usually, that's something that's pretty easy to do and not something to worry about. So here I am straightening out the parts and aligning them to the pixel grid wherever I can. I'm only doing this in areas where those edges are sort of already more or less like that on the three D model. If there is a panel or a seam that's going diagonally across the model, then, you know, I won't force that to be horizontal or vertical because that would just result in way too much distortion. You do sort of want to look out for distortion, especially on fabric parts because if you have any sort of pattern or even the fabric weave, if it gets very distorted, that's somewhat visible on your model. So yeah, whenever you're unwrapping a mesh that has a tiling texture applied to it, you sort of do want to be a little bit more aware of area distortion. In general, a little bit of distortion is always okay. You can check the distortion in the drop down menu on the top right of the UV editor. There is an area distortion view mode, and basically it will show the areas that are smaller in terms of textil density in red and the areas that are larger in terms of texil density in blue. A little bit of area distortion is okay, so a pink color is fine. Another thing you can do to check for area distortion is just to look at your UV texture checker. If the letters or the numbers are very big in one area, that means it's lacking in textile density. If the area is very small, or rather the numbers and the letters are very small or the grid as well is very small, then that means it's more dense than other areas. Right now, I'm splitting off that separate little panel of fabric that was there that goes along the armpit, because I just sort of remembered that that was a separate part, and that might make it a little bit easier to get rid of some of the more severe distortion towards the top part of the torso, where the sort of boob comes in and it sort of makes the UV island a little bit distorted in that area. So, yeah, after I split off that little patch of fabric there, I decided to start over and redo all of the peel mapping just because I might get a slightly better result if I start over rather than trying to reposition all of the pins I already put down. All of these things are fairly fast. It doesn't take too long to do a peel map, just a couple of minutes. So don't be afraid to start over if you feel like you're getting bogged down trying to fix all of your existing pins. Don't be too precious about your work. And yeah, just take a look at your texture, checker and see if any of the squares or the letters look disproportionately large. If they're slightly larger than other places, it's okay. In this case, a little bit of area deformation or distortion around the upper chest is fine and pretty much unavoidable just because that's where the fabric sort of bulges out. It's also something that might you might want or be fine with very skin type fabric if you actually want those areas to be distorted when you're applying some sort of tiling texture, and you really want to get across the impression that that area is stretching or, you know, stuff like that. So, yeah. I'm just going to work on the edge of this sort of sleeve or mp area. Trying to get rid of as much distortion as I can. Again, like I said earlier, it's never going to be completely free of distortion, but I guess the best indication is to just look at the texture checker and see if sort of size and the shape of all of the squares and stuff is acceptable and to your liking. You don't want them to be too small or too big. You just roughly want everything to be more or less consistent. And this is more important when you're planning to use some sort of tiling pattern on that area, whether it's like a fabric tiling, you know, like the weave of the individual strands of fabric and stuff like that, or if it's, you know, some sort of tartan or stripy pattern as well. If the object, you know, you're unwrapping isn't going to have any sort of tiling texture to it, so maybe it's, you know, just some sort of metal part or stuff like that, or some sort of organic part, then you don't have to worry about distortion that much. You can actually get away with a lot, especially later on when we get to the head and the skin. The head is super distorted around the back of the head and the sides of the head because those parts are made a lot smaller than the actual face where you want all of the attention and the detail to be. You don't really care about the sides of the head nearly as much as you do about the front. And while you do sometimes apply a micro tiling skin texture to the face, usually it's a lot more subtle and it's not as sort of how should I say as organized as something like a fabric texture, right? Pores generally, you know, you won't really be able to tell if they're distorted or not as long as they're small enough to where they don't really pop out into view. So, yeah, with stuff like skin and organic objects, you can get away with a lot of distortion. Same with, like, stuff like rocks and trees and whatever, right? But when it comes to fabric or really anything that has a tiling texture applied to it, you do need to be a little bit more careful with distortion. Doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be pretty close. So, yeah, I don't want anything that is bright blue or bright red. Some light blues and some pinks are okay in this case. The area distortion checker, I guess what's best for is just having immediate visual feedback as you're moving vertices around. But in general, to check your final result, you'll just want to take a look at the text of checker and just see if areas don't look too big or too small, because that's your best reference, just looking at the three D view port. I'm also going to straighten out this edge, even though it is sort of curvy and goes inwards and outwards on the three D model, I feel like it might be better to straighten this area out because I'll have that nice crisp, vertical pixel grid aligned seam in this area. So, yeah, I'm going to straighten this area out. And, you know, if I see in the three viewport that it's really super distorted and bad looking, then, you know, I might just remove all of these pins and let it be wonky and not straightened out. But I'm going to try straightening it out first and see how that looks. If it looks okay, then I'll leave it straightened out. Which hopefully will look quite good. And yeah, I'm looking at the three E view port here, and it looks pretty good like this. So I'm going to keep it straightened out. And I'm actually going to straighten out the edge loop that is next to it, so I can have another, you know, consistent thickness and pixel grid aligned edge there as well, just to make sure that this area is very crisp and doesn't have any sort of stepping or pixelation visible. This is especially more important when you're working with a lower resolution. Once your resolution is so high in terms of texture map resolution, once it's so high that you can't see the pixels anymore, it becomes less relevant to align things to the pixel grid. But it's probably still a good idea anyway for MIP maps and stuff like that, and whatever. I kind of want to scale this area, so it's a little bit closer to all the stuff around it. I don't like this sort of under arm area being, you know, scaled too large compared to the area right next to it. So I'm trying to sort of move it upwards into the side a little bit, so it's closer to the chest area that's right next to it. So a few more tweaks in this area, and it seems good to go. It's more or less gray, so that means it's neutral in terms of area distortion compared to everything else. You may be tempted to cut protruding parts of UV islands off that are like this. That would make this part a little bit easier to pack in with other things. The more square and less protrusions a part has, the easier it is to pack in with everything else, right? But I would strongly advise you don't do that because then you'll have to sort of match up any of the tiling fabric texture. You apply to it in substance painter along that seam, otherwise the seam will be very visible and unsightly. It's definitely not something you want to have in the middle of your fabric. While it is possible to sort of paint over a seam like that and match it up, it's extra work. It makes your texturing process a little bit more destructive, so you're a little bit less flexible when you're texturing because you can't simply just change the scale of your tiling texture or something like that once you've painted out the seam, because, you know, painting out the seam, you're probably going to be using something like the clones damp tool or something like that. And, you know, that's not a procedural tool. So once you've painted out the seam, you're pretty much stuck with it, or you have to redo it if you want to make a change. So, the amount of UV space you would save in terms of, you know, texture density efficiency by packing your eeland slightly better once you've, you know, snipped off any protruding parts is negligible compared to how much less flexible you are going to be when you're actually texturing a mesh like that with all sorts of seams in the middle of islands, and it just won't look as good. So yeah, I strongly advise you don't snip any parts of that off. Just leave fabric panels as they are. One entire panel for every panel there is on the high poly. And yeah, that's the best way to go about it. Uh, this back part was very easy to flatten out because there's a lot less area distortion going on on the back because the back is much flatter compared to the front side of the torso. That's on both men and women, more so for women, obviously, or female torsos, I should say. For that little piece of fabric that sort of goes over the front of the armpit, there's not really too much to bovether with there. There's only one that bottom part of it that I had to straighten out. The rest of it is all curvy and stuff. So, um there wasn't really too much I could straighten out. Now, moving on to the pants, there is a second seam that goes down the inner side of the pants. This is the usual way that pants are sewn, but, you know, there's different kinds of patterns for every type of clothing. So you need to pay attention to where the seams are on your high poly or, you know, on the actual model and match them up in your UV map on the low poly, as well. So now I'm going to be splitting the pant islands along that seam on both sides. Just making sure that I am tracing the correct edge loop for both of these. I don't want to put this seam in the wrong spot because it would be a bit of a hassle to redo. Just making edge selections and using the Explode button on the right hand toll panel of the UV editor, that button right there. And that will split things along the selected edge. So that's the pants Islands split in half. Now I'm just going to detach the pockets as well. It's kind of optional whether you want to detach details like pockets and stuff. If they're detached as their own UV islands, then it's very easy to use UV Island masking in substance painter in order to fill them with different tiling material. But you can also just paint those masks in manually. In this case, I've already detached the pockets along one side to, you know, split the pants UV islands up, so I figured I may as well detach them from the other side. If you have, like, a different fabric detail that's within another island entirely or, you know, flush against one, one edge of an island, then you may decide that you don't want to split that detail off from that main island at all. Yeah, it's entirely up to you. You know, it's not essential to split off every single fabric panel, but generally doesn't make texturing a little bit easier. And also, if your UV islands are divided up a little bit more then it's slightly easier to pack as well. Now I'm just splitting off the waistband. The waistband is more important to split off because it's going to have a different fabric applied to it than the pockets, and it's going to be in a different direction as well. And so I've just made sure to get all of the polygons that make up the waistband and split them 49. 09 Packing Uv's And Baking: Welcome to Chapter nine of UV mapping and baking. So I'm just carrying on where I left off in the last chapter, just finishing up on straightening out these last few UV islands, same exact tools, same exact process as what I did in the last chapter. So I really don't have too much to say about what I'm doing on screen here right now. I've said everything about what I'm doing in the last chapter. So if anything's still unclear, you know, you can check that one out. I won't be doing any more commentary on the peel tool and straightening out UVs. In this one, because it's just a few more minutes of me straightening out these few last UV islands until I get to packing. And when I get to packing, I will have more cenary and I will explain, you know, my whole process for packing and how to set it up in a way that will make it easy to use tiling textures or for that matter, be able to use tiling textures at all effectively and, you know, how to maximize textil density. So yeah, for the next few minutes while I finish up stating out these last few UV islands, this will just be a little time laps without commentary, and then I will pitch in with some commentary. So I'm almost done with straightening out the UV islands. Now. There's a few that I'm not going to touch at all, and that's just because they don't have any straight sides. So if all the sides are curved, then there's nothing you can really straighten out, and there's no reason to go through and try and, you know, straighten stuff out. So those I'm just going to leave as they are. For comparison, I'm bringing up the previous auto pack from before I started out the UVs, and you can see that even this automatic pack that I just did with the straightened out UVs has a significantly higher textile density. If I compare the actual UV checkers of the previous unwrap, which is on the right here and the current one, you can see that the textil density is at least 30% higher, I would guess. If you actually compare how many squares of the UV texture checker you can see on the leg, it looks like I have maybe one or 1.5 more extra squares that I can see across the leg and the letters look about 30% bigger to me. You can see how much of an impact just straightening out your UVs already does to the point where an autopack actually starts to work quite well because it has a bit of an easier time aligning straight edges to each other as opposed to all sorts of curved and concave parts, right? So actually if you just go ahead and straighten out your UVs, an auto packer can do a reasonably good job, and you don't really have to go through and manually pack stuff all that much. But I do like going through and putting in that extra little bit of work to squeeze out as much textil density as I can out of my UV maps. So I actually go through and usually pack my textures manually for character parts like this. So I don't have any very specific rules or advice on how to do a really efficient pack. To be honest. Generally, what I'll do is I'll take the auto pack, and if it looks fairly good, I'll scale it up by maybe ten or, you know, scale it up a little bit more than what it already is and then try and move stuff around and fit it into one UV grid square. So by that way, you know, if I scale something up that's already packed in reasonably well, then I can look for areas where I can sort of move stuff around and pack it in even better. This isn't really something you have to do. It is optional. It's something that maybe I'm just used to doing, and it's a habit I've gotten into. Very often, auto packs will just be used or, you know, I'll do an auto pack and then simply adjust it slightly wherever there are maybe questionable areas where a person could do it better. So yeah, if you don't feel like, you know, fiddling around and doing the packing manually yourself, you can just go with an autopack as long as it has done a reasonably good job of using up all of the UV space. Uh, now a few rules to remember not to break when you're packing your UVs, generally try and keep objects with the same material sort of aligned in direction in UV space. If you see all of the pants here, I have them facing down vertically. So if I apply a tiling texture in substance painter to it, for, you know, the actual fabric, it will be facing the same direction, and it will sort of make sense because if I have them facing all diagonally, it will look quite bad and very unrealistic because that's not how people sew clothes together, right? You don't mix and match patterns diagonally together. Typically, you follow the direction of the fabric when you're cutting out your patterns before sewing them together. So you want to usually do that for all sorts of things that use tiling textures. And in general, it's a good idea to align stuff horizontally or vertically. If you have stuff diagonally, then applying textures and stuff like that, especially in the two D viewport in substance painter becomes a bit of a pain. So as long as things are aligned vertically and horizontally, it's a little bit easier. Now, sometimes if you really are strolling to fit maybe an odd shaped piece in or in general, maybe you just have one tiny hole that you can fit something in at an odd angle, and it's maybe like a one off UV island that doesn't have that isn't going to be sharing some sort of tiling texture with anything else, then it's fine to put something in horizontally or diagally or whatever at an odd angle. But in general, you do want to keep to this rule of keeping all of your stuff aligned in a UV direction. Now, if you're really struggling for space, if you have some oddly shaped islands that you can't fit in in any other way, then sometimes you might have one vertical and then one horizontal. And then in substance painter, you would mask out both areas separately and then apply that tiling texture to both of those islands separately on one of them horizontally and on the other vertically. But that's something that, you know, will slow down your texturing process, and, you know, you won't be able to do some stuff in engine as easily because then you'll need a mask to split those areas up if you want to apply a micro tiling texture in engine as well. So in general, it's something you want to avoid, but it is a rule that can be broken if you are really hard up for UV space or if you know what you're doing. But, yeah, in general, look at what I'm doing. I have all of my pants aligned vertically. I have all of the shirt parts aligned vertically, same with, you know, the scarf on the back and the little flap of fabric around the front. Trying to align them in direction. In your UV map. That's generally a good idea. The other thing you want to look out for is padding around the UV islands. So you need to leave a little bit of space around every single UV island. You can't have them edge to edge because what will happen is as you zoom out in your three E renderer or whatever you have it in any real time engine, we'll mip map textures. So that means as you zoom out, you will scale the resolution down. So your 2048 texture will go down to a 1024 and then a 512. And if your UV islands are very close to each other, or if the borders are touching each other, what you'll have is the edges between the colors on those UV islands will blur as the resolution gets lower. And you will start to have textures leaking into different islands, and you'll start to have colors showing up where you don't need them to and stuff like that. So that's why you need to leave a gap around every single UV island. This is a setting you can set up around the packing options if you're doing an auto pack. It is the padding, it's named padding down there. So, just have that set to an appropriate distance. The way you can understand how much padding you need between textures is if you think about pixels and the distance in pixels between your UV island borders, and how many times a texture is going to get down scaled as you mi map. So the lower MP maps like something like 512 and below, sort of ignore because by that time, whatever object you have on screen is going to be very small, and any sort of color bleeding across UV islands isn't going to be hugely relevant. Of course, this is sort of dependent on what kind of textil density you are using in your game. If stuff is lower resolution, then you need to consider lower resolution M maps and all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of a tech thing. It's not something I've ever had to worry about. Usually, I just get told or generally, I just follow my own rule of thumb, which is 16 pixels for all sorts of modern stuff. Different platforms or wherever you're working will have different requirements. So in general, it's just important to show that you understand that you need to leave gaps between your UV islands. So if you think about it in terms of pixels and distances, say you have a 2048 texture and you've left four pixels between your two UV islands, right? So you downscale that once to a 1024. And divide that distance in pixels by half as you downscale. Now you have two pixels between your two UVns. Downscale that again to a 512. Now you only have now you're sharing a pixel for the border. So that's bad. That's when you have colors bleeding across into each other. So if you have a four k texture, as you downscale that down to a 512, I think that will be, let's see, 20 form perhaps maybe. So you want to times that by another four, and 16 is approximately the sort of amount of padding I would leave on a four k texture. And that's kind of what I'm eyeballing here. I don't actually go in and measure the distance of the padding I leave because it's not a make or break thing, and, yeah, you're really worried, leave it a little bit more, but it's not a huge deal, show that you understand the importance of padding and you'll probably be fine. Sorry about that. It's very rare that I would ever have issues with colors bleeding across UV islands, to be honest. So just sort of eyeball that distance. It can help to think about what resolution your monitor is. And if you scale your UV map up to where it covers the whole height of your monitor, you can sort of guess pixel distances that way. That's how I estimate stuff, kind of. Um, yeah, I just eyeball the distances, if I'm honest, but that's a logic into what you should think about for the distances that you're leaving for padding. Now, I'm just going to stitch these two islands to each other because I saw that having them separate wasn't really helping much. Um, Well, it wasn't really, you know, saving me any space or helping me pank these islands any differently. I was going to leave both of these UV islands in the same spot. So I'm just going to go through and weld it to the other one, and you can use weld the stitch tools for this. But sometimes they will deform your UV islands, especially if you have gone through and edit to them with peel mapping separately, then it can sort of leave some stretching where it stitched them up. So I went in and manually welded them together just to avoid that. When it comes to all of the end caps of body parts, I just scale them down quite small because they're not meant to be visible. So it's okay to scale them down quite small. I do still leave them with a little bit of size just so that I can paint in ambient oclusion and whatever, if I need to, if a tiny part of it is still visible, I don't want to scale them down right down to one pixel. So I leave them with a bit of size, but I scale them down small enough to where I can easily pack them in to anything else. And that's all I have to say about packing UV map islands. It's not really too hard. The hardest part is straightening out your UV islands. But in general, I find once you understand the concept of UV mapping, it's actually really easy and straightforward. So yeah, that's all I have to say about that. Now, here I am in Mam z tool bag. I'm setting up my BAC groups in this BAC project. So I'm just putting all of the different parts of the low poly. If you remember, I split the low poly up so I can use baking roots to avoid the issue of different parts getting baked onto each other, where they're near each other. So all the low polyps go into a separate baking group, and then I have to figure out which parts of the high poly belong to which of those low poly in their baking groups. So I'm just going through and checking which parts are which by making them invisible and visible again just to see which is which. And when I get to the zippers, I noticed that they're kind of split up wrong in such a way that I can't separate out the little loose hanging parts you pull on into, you know, the zipper low poly baking groups, so I need to go into Zerush and split them up. So instead of them being split up left to right, I need to split off the tops or the loose hanging parts from the main bottom parts. And the main bottom part goes with um, the baking group with the main body of the pants. They get baked down into the surface of the pants, and the loose hanging parts get baked belong in their own little baking group, where it's just that little part by itself. So I've just exported these out separately. There's no reason to export them with everything else because that would be a massive hassle. So exporting them out separately and just dragging the different parts into their corresponding baking groups, again, and I can now go for another test bake and see if there are any more unresolved issues with this bake. First thing I need to do is set up the output location correctly. And as usual, I'm exporting as a PNG because that makes it easy to see the thumbnails. And I'm not going to be increasing any of the baking settings yet because I'm still testing. I want to keep these bakes quick and not waste any time. So I instantly noticed one issue, which is one of the hi poles has been misplaced. Actually, what's happened here is I need to duplicate the high poly for, the sort of loose hanging fabric here, that little cloth square because I need it to be both in the lower cloth square baking group and in the whole pants baking group at the same time. And the way to do that is to just duplicate the high polypat in question and have it included in both baking groups. Now zooming on the zippers. They actually turned out quite well. This is only a 2048 bake. The final one, of course, is going to be four K. There is a little bit of aliasing around the seams here, but that's going to be easily fixed by increasing the sampling rate when I bake. So that's just a matter of increasing the settings on the baker. So that's nothing to worry about for now. And last thing I noticed was that the cape didn't have any normal map applied to it, so I checked the actual bake result, and it looks like there was a normal map. The normal map came out fine there. So it's probably an issue with the materials. So I'm re exporting the whole low poly just in case that fixes it. And yeah, I'm realizing here that the cape actually has a different material applied to it than the rest of the body. But even if it does, I should be able to just drag the same material onto it in MamzeTolbg Even, you know, you can have two different material slots on the same object and drag the same material onto them. Without issue, but for some reason, Mama set tool Bag just isn't letting me change the material on the cape at all. So I'm going in to three GS MAX and fixing the material issue myself there and re exporting it now with correct materials on everything, and on reloading, it looks like it's fine. So that's how I solved that issue, and I just left that in there in case something similar comes up for you, where for some reason, you can't change the material on an object. In that case, you probably have to go and fix it in three years Max and reimport that object, and that should solve it hopefully. So this all looks decent, but there's still a few artifacts around the area where the sort of loop hanging cloth leaves the body, right? Because where I have the loose hanging cloth in the baking group with the rest of the pants, it's sort of baking down onto the surface of the pants. So what I need to do is go to the high poly of the loose hanging fabric part. Uh, right here. And I'm going to split it in half. This way, I'll be able to only have the top half of the cloth in the baking group with the pants, and then I won't have the bottom half of this high poly object getting baked onto the surface of the pants where I don't want it, right? So I'm being very careful to mask off the area that I want to get rid of. And for the outside of this part, I'm masking just below where the high the low poly starts rather. And on the inner side, I'm going to mask just above because the inner side, I'm not concerned about baking because I'm baking just the surface side down to the surface of the pants. The backside basically isn't getting baked at all. So I'm going to remove just a little bit more of it just in case you were to leave an artifact or something like that. Then for the outer side, I'm leaving a little bit of extra just so I don't have a gap in the bake, right? I basically want to have a little bit of overlap to make sure that there's no gaps where I'm missing a little bit of high poly and then the low poly has nowhere to receive baking information from. So once I've masked it off, I just split it off and I'm just exporting this top half of the high poly here and I'm going to test this out, see how that helps the bake. One thing I am going to remind you guys is if you exported all of your low poly parts as one object, then every time you reimport, unfortunately, you have to drag each individual element of your low poly or high poly, for that matter, into each slot or each baking group. You have to basically set it up all over again. And you can avoid this by just exporting every single part of low poly as a separate object. But if you don't do that, then yeah, every time you reimport, you're going to have to drag it into every single baking group all over again. Now I've imported my high poly, and I'm just going to drag it into the correct baking group. That's the one with the pants. There we go. And time to test bake again and see what I get. So this is pretty much exactly what I wanted to see. There's no more of the bottom of this cloth square getting baked onto the pants. There is a very small artifact leftover where the seam is on both sides. It's just a few pixels big. You can see it, but it is going to be completely covered up by the belt, and it's not something that is really avoidable. Although I guess if I really wanted to, I could paint it out in Photoshop, just manually editing the normal map to get rid of any sort of unevenness in the normal map in that area. But because it's going to be completely covered up by the belt, it's really not important. So I'm cleaning up just one little duplicated vertice on the pants there, and now I'm going to go ahead and set up the end caps for the high poly for the sleeve and then a little bit later on the top of the pants. So this is just to get rid of, you know, the end cats being really messy and chaotic on the previous bake when there's nothing filling in that area, because the low polyly will, you know, sort of bake through the entire body there and you will get a very messy, normal map in that area. And I guess this isn't super important because this isn't going to be a very visible area. But I prefer it if these end caps are nice and neat and clean and really don't have anything in them just like they're supposed to be. But, yeah, I guess if you're lazy, you can skip this. All I'm doing is getting the plane in here that I made earlier and sort of lining it up with the edge of cavity and making sure that it's fairly close to where I put the cap on the low poly, just so I don't have to adjust the baking cage too much. And yeah, I just want it nice and smooth with no detail in it, so it just bakes as a nice, neutral, purple, normal map color, and there's none of that messy noise that there was there before. So I'm going to export this end cap and import it into the marmosette scene and just put it in the correct spot in the correct baking group. So it takes me a few different tries to get the right baking group that the end cap is meant to belong to. But when I do finally get it right, you can see how nice and clean the result is. So right there, you can see that it's nice, smooth end cap. It's going to be very easy to just paint on some ambient occlusion, some dark albedo and just make it a nice little shadow. Even if it's really not going to be visible in the end result, I feel like it makes your normal maps look a little bit neater. So if you're a bit of a perfectionist, you know, this is probably something you want to do. If you feel like you don't want to do it, then, you know, feel free to skip it. It probably won't show up on your renders at all. But if you are going to be showing off your normal maps in wherever you're putting this piece as like a portfolio piece, then maybe this is a good idea to do this because it will look a little bit neater in your normal maps as well. If you're going to be displaying them. I'm doing the same thing for the cap of, you know, the top of the pants. And what I did for this one is I just took the cap of the low poly and duplicated it and split it off from the low poly, and I've imported that, and I'm using that as an end cap. Now, I actually ran into a few issues with this, and honestly, I didn't spend too much time troubleshooting it. I just went in and redid it using a plane instead. I'm sure if I did some troubleshooting, I could have figured out what was going on here, but I didn't I'm not sure why this didn't work, honestly. At first, it didn't seem to do anything. This may have just been an issue with how far the offset was, but even when it did do something, if I take a look at the normal map now, you'll see something very unusual. So here's the actual normal map. And you can see that this end cap has rendered out as a dark gray circle, which definitely isn't something you want to see on your normal maps. You want your normal maps to mostly be purple, and, you know, there's a few different shades of normal map color. You don't want to see a dark gray circle in there. I really don't have any idea what's going on here. Maybe the normals on this end cap were inverted or something like that, something strange going on like that, but, you know, I didn't really feel like investigating. I just went ahead and used Step Build to sort of build out an end cap within the inside of the hi polyhe and just spent a few minutes doing that instead of going through and checking what might be wrong with what I did before because this doesn't take too long, and honestly, I did not want to bother figuring out why that was baking so weirdly. So yeah, this was my solution, using the retpoTols to model out this end cap within the inside of the high poly, and I'm going to export this out and do the exact same thing with this. So as soon as I get it into Mom's tool bag, I noticed that I didn't have any smoothing groups on the end cap, so I went ahead and applied one smoothing group to the whole thing and re exported. And now that it's re exported, this looks a lot better, so it's time to give it a test bake, and it looks like there's no weird issues going on here. The only thing wrong here is that the low poly is clipping through the baking plane the end cap plane a little bit, so I need to increase the offset. Now, I'm not 100% sure if I've already introduced painting offsets in Mom set Tolbag yet. So yeah, don't worry if I haven't introduced it yet, I will talk about it a little bit more later in this video when I get to fixing up the offsets on the rest of the low poly. It's really a straightforward thing. But yeah, what I'm doing now is just painting the area around the end cap on the low poly white value to bring the offset up in that area. And even though I painted it up to the highest value, it was still clipping through a little bit, so I decided to go into three SMAx and lower the whole thing down a tiny bit. So I'm just using soft select to make this a little bit faster so I can move several vertices at once. In hindsight, maybe I could have just moved the whole thing down and gone around the border and snapped it to the edges or something like that. So I probably didn't choose the fastest way to bring this whole thing down, but, you know, it is what it is. It only took a few minutes either way. So yeah, I'm pretty much just selecting vertices and dragging them downwards and making sure not to leave a gap between the sides of the cap and the surface of the pants. Another thing you want to make sure to do is not to have this poking through the other side of the pants if you have set a negative offset value to maybe slightly clip this end cap into the surface of the pants so you don't have any gap between the sides, then be aware that, you know, make sure you're not clipping through the front of the pants when you're doing that. That is one thing you can do. In the conform settings, you can set the offset to be slightly negative to clip it into the surface. I didn't do any of that here. I just usually keep the offset at zero when I'm making low pools in general, and I did the same here. Maybe slightly clipping it through the surface would have been helpful. But the pants are quite thin and I didn't want anything clipping through the front, so I chose to keep it at zero here. And here is the finished end cap of the pants. Nice and clean, nice and smooth. Nothing strange going on there, so that part is done. And now I can move on to identifying any remaining clipping issues between the baking cage and the high poly and painting them out using the paint offset tool. So what I'm doing here is just baking out on an ambient occlusion map because usually clipping issues show up a little bit better on the ambien occlusion map, but you can see them just fine with just the normal map as well, usually. Basically, on the normal map, it will look like a little circular patch with no detail in it, usually. Well, I guess I'll explain what the clipping issues are in the first place. It's wherever the high poly is above the surface of the baking cage. Now the baking cage is that sort of thing that is shown in green when I select the low poly. You can see it right here, and how it works is it projects from the surface of the baking cage down to the surface of the low poly, and the low polly projects upwards from beneath its surface infinitely, basically. So you don't have to worry about below the low polly, but you do have to worry about above the below polly. And yeah, what the paint offset tool does is it lets you it's basically a displacement map. So where it's black, it lowers the offset or the amount that the baking cages offset from the surface of low poly and white values increase that distance, and gray values are just a medium value that doesn't do anything. So the two sliders you see under cage options, they're hidden behind the paint offset window now a little bit, but you can see the little drop down where it says cage. The minimum value is how low down to the surface of the low poly, the baking cage will go. So usually it's fine to keep that at zero. And then the maximum distance is how far above the surface it can go at its highest value. You don't want to set that too high because then you'll have to paint a lot of areas down. If you have your offset distance very far, then you'll have issues of the baking cage intersecting with itself, which also causes parts to bake onto themselves. That's something you don't want as well. So in general, you want to keep it at just the right value where the baking cage encompasses most of the areas of your high bollly and then maybe there's a few tiny patches that you have to paint out manually. So the area I'm painting out now is where the cloth sort of ends on the pants par, and then it transitions to a different low poly object later on. And I'm just playing around with which values leave me with the least artifacts in this area. But in general, that area is completely hidden, so I'm not too worried about it, and it's probably impossible to paint out artifacts in that area entirely. So yeah, I'm just going to make it as good as possible in that area, but otherwise, I'm not going to worry too much. I found a duplicated vertex here, so I'm just going to weld it and re export the low poly really quick. And what I'm exporting here is just the pants part of the low poly, and that is because if I was to export everything like I usually do, then I would have to drag all of the different parts of the low poly into their corresponding baking groups because the way reimporting in mom's toolbg works is it only reimports that main sort of top of the hierarchy folder thing. And then everything you've dragged out of it into different places does not get updated at all. It just stays where it is. So by just exporting the legs, then, you know, I only have to redo the legs part. If I was to re export everything, then I would have to drag all of the different parts into their own folders. So yeah, keep that in mind when you're exporting your stuff for your final bakes and stuff like that. I found another little issue here. Usually, when you have a little black spot like that that you can't paint out, no matter how you try, that usually means you have a duplicated vertex in that area. And if I check my low poly, I can see that is exactly what's happened. So I'm re exporting again. And I'm hitting the bake button in order to update the ambient occlusion map because it doesn't automatically update as I paint stuff. And now I'm slightly reducing the distance on the tips of these zippers just because the further away your cage is, the more sort of skewing issues you get where the sort of angles of the baking cage is slightly off and you get basically, a lot of the details get baked onto the wrong areas of the low poly. So generally, especially for little detailed bits like that, you might want to lower the cage distance to be closer to the high poly. I'm also just barely increasing the distance around the zippers, just in case some of them might not be baking down correctly, but that was just out of an abundance of caution. I don't think there was any actual issue there, so that wasn't something I really needed to do. So yeah, taking another good look at the pants, and it looks like everything is pretty good here, so I'm going to move on to the next part. And it's these little zippers. You can hit F to frame your selection or go down to the view panel and find that option as well. That's what I just did there to find these little zipper parts. And I'm also reducing the distance of the baking cage here just because they're very small and I don't want the little hole in the middle to bake in on itself. They do look a little bit rough because this is very low resolution, or not very low resolution, but they're very small parts, so they don't have a huge amount of resolution to them. And also this is the quick bake, as I'm painting, if I do a proper bake, they will look a little bit better. And so if I increase the samples on the bake, they will look even better as well. And this is only a 2048 bake right now as well. So yeah, keep those things in mind. They will look a little bit better in the final bake. Moving on to the torso, I can't immediately see any issues here. So I'm turning on the ambient occlusion map just to see if anything else pops up there. And it looks like the torso is completely fine, so there's nothing to fix here. Now moving on to the bottom part of the fabric square. I can see a couple spots that I need to bake out, paint out with a slightly brighter value to increase the distance. And there's just one tiny little patch there. So I'll give that another go. And it looks like I need just a little bit more. Another thing you can do to check is to turn on your high poly view and see areas where it's clipping through the low poly. That also helps you find problem rays as well. So remember, you can always do that. The reason why I don't do a lot is because having your high poly objects visible really slows down your viewport. So yeah, I only do that when I'm having a little bit of trouble with an area. And I think I've checked all of the objects now, and they all look pretty good. So that's all there is to painting offsets. Just go through all of the elements of your low poly, take a good look at them. Look for areas where it looks like the baker has, you know, clipped and not captured some detail, and just either lower the offset your painting with darker values or increase the offset, painting with lighter values. And that's all there is to it. And MomseTolbg really is the best tool for baking because it lets you do this. No other tool has a system that's as good as this, as far as I know. Now, when it comes to the actual baking settings, you'll want to head over to the bake project object in the outliner. And the first thing I'm going to do is set up the different maps that I'll be baking, so head down to the configure button down here. And for configure, I'm going to be wanting a position, curvature, convexity, cavity. You don't really need thickness or height. In this case, I ticked height for no reason. I don't need that map. And you want both ambient occlusion maps, and you'll want either a material ID or an object ID. Material ID will assign a different color to your ID map for every material on your high and object ID will do the same for every object in your hi poly. In this case, it doesn't make a difference which I pick because I have one material for every subtol exported out. So both maps would look the same, basically. I set my resolution to four k samples to 16 times. You can use 64, but I find that it has no difference 16-64. Format 16 bits per channel and soften value to 0.1. And when it comes to the ambient occlusion maps, what I like to do is to have one set to ignore groups and the other one set to not ignore groups. And basically, what that will do is when you have ignore groups turned on, then it will make the ambient occlusion map for the entire object as if it was one and you will have nice contact shadows between different parts in your ambient occlusion map. And that's quite nice to have. And for the ambient inclusion map that has in groups turned off, you won't have any contact shadows, but that's usually slightly better when you're trying to mask stuff out using the ambient occlusion map in substance painter when you're texturing, because sometimes you don't want those contact shadows to be showing up when you're masking stuff in substance painter for your materials. So it's good to have both maps. And I've just fast forwarded through the BAC, baking out ambient occlusion maps. High resolution usually takes a few minutes, and I can now take a look at my final BAC results. And I can see that everything looks really good and in order here. Everything's really crisp and smooth. You can see that there's no more aliasing along the seams anymore. The zippers turned out very crisp and nice. Even the little zipper pull part looks pretty good. There's no more of that pixelation on it anymore. What's really helped the most with all of the aliasing along the seams is turning up the samples. Of course, cystex being in four K this time is also helping there a little bit, but mostly it's the samples that really help with all of the aliasing and stuff. Now, the other thing I'm going to check out is my material ID map, or in this case, I baked an object ID. So I'm just going to track that onto the albedo just to see if I actually do have the correct, you know, different colors assigned to all of the different objects I want on the high poly. And it looks like it's done a good job. Every single part I might want to mask off has been given a different color. But yeah, I'm just going to bake out a material 50. 10 Skin Topology And Preparing Uv's: A. This is Chapter ten of UV mapping and baking. Now that I've finished both the UVs and the bake on the body, it's time to move onto the next part. That's going to be the skin material. So if I take a look at the high poly, I can see that there's a sleeve going over the lower part of the arm, which means that's not going to be a skin material. It's going to be some sort of fabric material. The first thing I need to do is edit the topology a little bit, then will let me put a edge loop along the top of that sleeve and apply a different material to that bottom part of the arm so that only the top of the shoulder keeps this skin material. So what I'm going to do is use a working pivot point to help me do this. So you can click the use Working pivot point to actually start using the Wing pivot point. But before we do that, I need to place it. So if you click the Edit Working pivot point, that lets you place your working pivot point where you want it, I'm going to place it along the top of the sleeve and rotate it in the direction of the sleeve as well. As close as I can get it. Of course, the top of this leave isn't a perfect straight line, so I'm going to have to do a little bit of manual cleanup either way, but this will give me a good head start. And if I tick Pin working pivot, what that will do is it will keep the working pivot point in the same spot when you click Edit Working Pivot Point. Again, if you want to slightly reposition the pivot point. If you don't have pin Working pivot point ticked, every time you click Edit Working pivot, it will get reset to zero, and you'll have to drag it all the way into position again. Now, I'm selecting the edge loop that's closest to this sleeve, and I'm just scaling it downwards. And I'm making sure to have edge constraints turned on. And if I scale downwards towards the pivot point, you can see that it turns into a straight line that's aligned to the working pivot point, and that's exactly what I want. That's lined up all of the vertices along this edge loop pretty well with the top of the sleeve just like I wanted. Now to even out the edge loops around the top of the sleeve, I'm just going to click Select those loops and click Set flow, and that basically interpolates between the two surrounding loops of your selected edge loop. So it will sort of give you a result that's in between the positions of the top edge loop and the bottom edge loop. So you can sort of work back and forth between edge loops. So do one that's above the one, you want to smooth out, and then the one that's below it, and then, you know, just sort of apply set flow back and forth to get a much smoother result rather than just applying it over and over again on the same edge loop. Sort of work back and forth and you'll get a smoother result as it interpolates between every interpolated result. Yeah, that's how you can sort of smooth things out even better using the set flow tool. Now I'm just going to use the conform brush to bring all of these vertices back to the surface of the high poly. And just going to go around and make sure everything is snapped to the surface of the hi poly here because of course, the set flow tool doesn't take into account your hi poly or anything. It just interpolates between the two edge loops around it. I'm also going to use the relax brush a little bit, but I'm making sure not to hit any of the vertices of the actual edge loop that defines, you know, where the sleeve is because I want those to stay exactly where they are. I'm adding an extra edge loop to the armpit because I felt like it did need another one to support all of the deformation that's going to be going on around the shoulder. You can imagine how much deformation there is between, you know, the arm all the way down and then the arm all the way up. It's probably one of the hardest areas to rig on the body just because, you know, it's probably the part with the highest range of motion that there is. So yeah, adding that edge loop and relaxing stuff out a little bit, making sure it's all smooth. And the next thing I'm going to do is just separate the actual sleeve part from the rest of the high poly here, just so I can isolate it without having all of those, you know, accessories show up and get in the way of what I'm trying to do and what I'm trying to see. So this makes it a little bit easier to see. And now I'm going back to the low poly. And I'm going to line up every single vertex with the top of the sleeve here. So just using the drag tool and manually making sure that they're a spot on with the top of a sleeve and after that, what I'll do is I'll add another edge loop here, just so I can have a little bit of a height difference between where the skin is and where this sleeve is. And that will sort of help separate these parts out and not have a really smooth transition between the skin and the sleeve. I feel like that might help a little bit. So I've added in another edge loop ter with the Swift loop tool, and now I'm also manually aligning all of these vertices with the top of the sleeve here. So yeah, nothing complicated here. I guess you could use bevel or some sort of extrude in order to do this as well, and maybe not have to align every single vertex manually, but chances are some of them are still going to be, you know, at the wrong height, so you'll probably have to still do some cleanup manually, even if you do that. The next thing I want to do is add an extra edge between all of these edges in the horizontal direction, just because, you know, this is a very prominent line on the body. And at this resolution in terms of geometry, it's actually kind of visible than it is jagged. So I'm just going to add some extra geometry here where it is visible, just to make sure that it looks a little bit more smooth than it is here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select these two edge loops. I'm not going to select the ones that are behind that sort of pouch pocket thing because that area is not visible, so I don't really need the extra geometry here. And with these two edge you've selected, you can use connect to add in that extra edge, but a slightly better option is to use flow connect. That will actually interpolate between them and give you a smooth result, which in this case, because this object is kind of cylindrical, it gets them pretty close to where you need them to be uh, of course, I'm probably going to have to do some manual cleanup just because, you know, this isn't a perfect cylinder, so that automatic interpolation isn't going to give me the perfect result. But still, you can see how much more round this area looks. And I only need this extra geometry here where this sort of line on the body is really visible, right? Because in other areas where, you know, you don't have this visible line, the extra geometry isn't really going to help. As long as the actual silhouette is smooth, that extra geometry isn't doing anything. But here, where there's, like, a very visible line on the body, it's definitely a good idea to add extra edges between those two parts, just so it looks nice and smooth because before then, I could see the visible faceting and stuff like that. So I'm just zooming out now to take a look at the result I've gotten here and whereether I'm liking it, and it looks pretty good. So what I'll do now is I'm going to apply a different smoothing group to everything that makes up the sleeve part. One thing to remember when you're adding smoothing groups or hard edges is that you can only have hard edges or boundaries between two different smoothing groups where you're going to have UV seams. So you need to have a UV seam along every single hard edge on your model. Otherwise, that hard edge will show up in your bakes. So that's something to take into account when you're adding hard edges. In general, having a hard edge between two objects like this will slightly improve the sort of vertex normals in that area and improve the sort of gradients on your normal map. So it's a good idea to have them when you have harsh sort of transitions between materials like this. I'm just cleaning up the engons from all of the extra vertices that I added in this area now, just manually cutting to the nearest vertex with the cut tool, nothing fancy there. And slightly moving that edge loop down a tiny bit. Now, one thing I was looking at this, and I thought it might be a good idea is moving the sort of this edge loop here upwards a little bit, just to slightly improve the vertex nulls in that area and maybe the deformation because along sort of areas like this, like edges of cloth, if you have them stretching out a lot, that can sometimes look bad. So having an sort of edge loop that's sort of close to that little step is probably a good idea. So I'm moving it up to where I see a seam on the high poly. If you look closely, it's very subtle, but you can sort of see a very subtle seam that's been sculpted into the high poly just under where that edge is. And I'm adding an extra edge loop in here as well, just to even things out a little bit more and using set flow to sort of smooth stuff out even more. And this should look quite good now. The other thing I'm doing here is I'm detaching the sleeve from the arm underneath it in the high poly. And that's just check that I've snapped all of my vertices to the top of the sleeve and not the actual arm underneath just in case because as you know, with the conform tools, if you have several layers of faces, it's pretty common for them to get confused and snap to the one underneath instead of the one on top. So that's why it's a good idea for me to check by detaching the skin underneath that all of these vertices have actually snapped to the top surface of the sleeve instead of the skin underneath it. Now, I'm just adjusting the elbow area a little bit, adding an extra edge loop, and moving some of these edge loops down a little bit to sort of follow the shape of the muscles and the elbow here. I've moved some of these down to sort of follow the shape of the bicep and slightly compress them towards the center of the inner elbow as well. And that's typically what you want to do, especially if you're handling the topology of the joints this way, which is just adding a few extra edge loops instead of modeling in some specific topology for the actual joints, you still want those edge loops to more or less follow the shape of the muscles underneath there in order to get the best deformation and the best silhouette. Now I've just selected all of those faces and applied the accessories material to it, because what I'm thinking at this point is that these sleeves are going to go into the accessories material group. But that changes later on, but the important thing is to just apply a different material to the bottom of the sleeve here so you can have it distinct from the skin. And the next thing I'm going to tackle is the way the arm slots into the rest of the body. So if you remember from the test bake, it actually turned out quite poorly. The seam between the arm and the body was quite visible. In some areas, there was a gap between the arm and the body. In other areas, it was clipping into the end cap of the sleeve hole area in a visible way to where you could see a very jagged edge between where the skin clips into that end cap. So to fix this, I'm just extending the low poly of the arm to where it sort of snugly tucks in underneath all of the fabric parts, and you can no longer see that seam or that edge of the skin, right? Because it's tucked underneath the fabric. So all you can see is just the edge of the fabric, and then it's skin, and you don't know where the skin ends. So, you know, it's a much more realistic result. You can't see where the edge of the skin ends, so you sort of assume that the entire body is there as opposed to what I had before, visible edges, visible jagged seams that looked really bad. But just by extending the low poly of the skin a little bit underneath the fabric, that's all solved, and it looks much better now, and I don't have any jagged edges where these parts clash. The only part that is missing is I don't have any high poly for the top of the shoulder area there. So there is a little bit of a gap there at the top between the top of the vest and the top of the shoulder. So I'm going to have to take a look and see where that part of the high poly is if I have it at all and how I'm going to solve this. But otherwise, all of the areas on the sides and the bottom look really good now. There's no more of that really ugly seam. It just looks like skin underneath cloth. So that part's great. I just need to figure out how to do the top of the shoulder now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up my high poly moodel and I'm going to take a look at what's going on in that area and why that part of the hi poly is missing and where it is. So here I have my hi poly. Well, this is actually the decimated model, but, you know, it's just all of the high polyps decimated. So this is basically the same as the high poly. It's good enough for at least checking issues like this. All of the different subtols and parts are here. Uh, so I'm just selecting all the parts of that neck piece and detaching them. And I can see that the part of the skin that I'm missing just belongs to the head and the neck. So that's really good because that means I don't have any actual missing part of the hi poly. It's just attached to another object. So what I can just do is attach the high poly of the head to the shoulder, and now I can use this as my base for retopo there is a seam between these two parts, and if I zoom in very closely, I can easily see it. Part of this is because the head and the shoulder are a different poly resolution because these are sort of not exported at the highest subdivision level. These are just the hi polys for re topper. They're not the actual hi polys for baking. So the actual hi pools for baking seam is probably going to be a lot more subtle there. And because this isn't a highly visible area, I'm probably just gonna leave it like this and not bother with doing anything about that seam. If it is if it does turn out to be a little bit more visible, I will paint it out in substance painter. But the fact that these two parts are separate probably isn't going to be an issue when it comes to baking. So I'm just going to leave them like that, and, um yeah. Now for the top of the shoulder, I'm just doing what I did for the rest of the body and just extending out an extra edge loop to fit underneath the cloth and hide any sort of seam there. So that's that issue solved. This sort of connection between the arm and the body is figured out, and it looks pretty good. And this is a common way to approach this stuff in games, just sort of model a little bit of the skin underneath the cloth part that it fits into just to make sure that there are no visible gaps and weird things going on there. So the last thing to do on the actual skin stuff is to clean up the smoothing group. So I'm just going to select all of the new faces I added and apply the first smoothing group to them. And, yeah, that's pretty much done. Just go to give it a good look. There's some jaggedness along the top here where it clips into the top of the vest, but that's completely covered up. So I'm going to leave it as it is. If I did want to fix it, all I would have to do was align the edges of the skin with the edges of the cloth part. You can see that they're slightly off center from each other. If they were lined up perfectly, then the clipping there would be much better, and it would all look a lot better. But since it's all completely covered up, I'm not going to bother doing that. If in your case, it is something that is exposed, then remember to sort of clean areas like that up. You just need to line up the edge loops with each other between the layers. One thing I am noticing is that the shoulder looks a little bit jagged. So what I'm actually going to do is add one extra edge loop to this area. So I'm going to delete two edges from either side of the arm here so that this swift loop doesn't carry on through the entire arm. And now I'm going to use the conform tools to sort of smooth it out and see if just adding a single edge loop is enough to make this shoulder look a little bit smoother than it did before. And that should more or less do it. And yeah, that looks about as smooth as I would like it, so I'm just going to clean up these two engons that are leftover and maybe smooth some things down out here a little bit lower down and make sure all of these edge loops are even. And yeah, I definitely think the shoulder needed that extra edge loop because it was looking quite jagged before. So yeah, make sure you don't have stuff like that. I mean, it depends on your poly count. If you're going for something that's a little bit lower poly, then there's nothing you can really do about some jagged areas. But in this case, you know, this is well within my budget. So I definitely feel like that extra edge loop was warranted. So now I'm going to do a quick unwrap to clean these areas up, and it looks like one of these edges got detached, so I'm going to stitch it back to the rest of that UV island. And in general, I have to re unwrap the shoulder because, you know, all of this extra topology I added has slightly messed it up. So I've just used a quick peel on it, and now I'm welding up all of these edges that got disconnected because basically, the new topology I added. So of course, all of the seams and stuff are going to be messed up because it's not something I've manually touched before. So, um yeah, it looks a little bit hanky. And that'll be enough for now when it comes to the shoulder. What I really want to do now is do the final unwrap for the face. And what I'm actually going to use for the bulk of the work on the face UVs is Z brush. Because what you want to have with face unwraps is basically you more or less want to fit the entire head UV into the UV grid square. And then in order to not be wasting UV space on the sides of the head and the top of the head and the neck, which areas that are less important less detailed than the actual face, you want to have the face scaled up, and then you also want to do things like close the ear holes. So you're not wasting space by just having big ear holes and then close the eyes because you don't really need the eye sockets to have a lot of UV space, and you also need to scale up the nose because the nose protrudes forwards quite a lot. And in this planar projection, it's getting squashed down, so you're actually losing a lot of textile density in the nose. And for sort of shifting stuff around like this, um, it's very sort of organic shape, and you kind of need to shift things around a lot. And the tools in three Max, I mean, I guess you can use peel mapping to pull things around. Maybe you can use soft selection and stuff like that. But it's really quite tricky to do that in three years Max. And what Zbrush lets you do is pretty much use all of the, you know, standard sculpting brushes in the UV editor in Zbrush. To pretty much sculpt your UVs. It's very easy to do all of these things that I just said, scaling up parts of the face and stuff like that, using the masking and then you can feather out the edges of the masks and scale stuff up and move stuff around with the move brushes and all that. I actually like doing the UVs for faces in ZBrush, and that's what I'm going to be showing you in the next chapter is how I tackle doing the bulk of the work for face UVs in Z brush. So, that's going to be all for this chapter and I'll see you in the next one. 51. 11 Unwrapping The Characters Face: To Chapter 11. In this chapter, I'm going to be using Zbrush to clean up most of the UVs of the face. So what I've already done here is I've imported just the head mesh, and when I was exporting from FUDSMX, I made sure to export as an FBX and to have triangulate turned off. So I want to export it as quads so I can import it as quads into Zbrush. What I'm doing now is I'm just importing a checker texture so that I can check how my UVs look in Zbrush. There is actually a default one that comes with the Zbrush files, so you can just use that one instead of importing one if you like. Now, what I'm going to be using for all the UV mapping here is the UV master plugin. So if you head on up to the Z plug in dropdown, you'll find the UV master here. And just drag that entire drop down menu off to the left, so you don't have to open and close it every time you want to change a setting. And the first thing you're going to want to make sure it's turned on is use existing UV seams. That will continue using the thems you already set up in TD Max for every unwrap that UV Master does in Zbrush. So that way you won't lose the seams you already set up, the seams that are already where you want them. If you click the flatten button, it will flatten your three D model into the existing UVs that it has. So, you can see here that my UVs are actually flipped upside down from what they were in three MAX, and that's just how Zbrush handles UVs. It's a little bit annoying, but that's how it does it, and it is what it is. So flatten and unflatten shows you your two D view of the UVs and shows you your three D model. Now, if you hit the unwrap button, then Zbrush will basically do what is a quick peel in three year MAX. So using your existing seams if you have that setting turned on, it will do an unwrap of your head. And from here on, I can start working on my UVs. So what I'm going to do is I'll mask off the ears so that I can move them off to the side because I'm not going to really be touching the ears in Z brush. I can do those perfectly fine in three DSMX. The only place I'm worried about here is the face. That's the only part where I feel like C brush's tools are a little bit better for UV mapping than three DS Max's. So just in the move mode, I'm moving the ears off to the side so you don't get in my way, and heading back to draw mode, I can just use the move topological brush to manipulate the UVs however I need them. So just use it like a regular brush like you're sculpting in three D, and the only difference is that you're sculpting on the UV map. So you can use the floor to sort of see a UV grid square so that you can fit your UVs into a square grid and make sure that you're in orthographic view and not perspective when you're working with the UVs, that'll just make things a little bit easier and that you're in the front view. And just using the move topological brush, I can start to pull stuff around. So what's typically done for face unwraps is they are sort of scratched into a square shape. So the bottom of the neck aligns with the bottom of a UV tile square and sides or, you know, the back seam is aligned with the sides of the square. That way, you're maximizing the space used on the textla sheet, even if it does look a little bit strange. So I'm just using the move topological brush to move the sides up to the sides of this square and to smooth them out a little bit. The other thing I'm doing here is closing up the ear holes. You want all the holes like this, the mouth hole, if you have one, and the ear holes to be closed up because you don't want to be wasting UV space on a hole. So yeah, just using the UV, using the move topological brush to close up the ear holes. And then later in three years, Max, I'll be able to use the vertical align tool to straighten them out completely. So what I'm doing in Z brush is basically getting everything into the right shape, and then I'll be able to do a final parsing through Max to straighten out any areas that are a little bit wonky. What I'm doing now is I'm masking off the middle of the face so that I can squash the sides of the head downwards to make this entire unwrap a little bit more square shaped. So if you just mask off an area and then feather that mask out and then invert it, you can very easily select areas like this. I just have to make sure to mask the ears off so they don't get squashed as well. And just turn off s and just move the sides of the head inwards a little bit because I don't need that much UV space for the sides of the head. What I want is a lot of UV space for the actual face, and then the sides of the head, the neck, all of that. That can be half the resolution or a third of the resolution of the face. Really, the face is the important part when it comes to the UV map. What I'm doing now is I've masked out the face and I'm scaling it up a bit. When you're scaling stuff like this, you want to have symmetry turned so you can see how easy it is to move stuff around and scale stuff in Zbrush with the UV editor or UV master in Zbrush as opposed to having to do this in three Max. Just make sure that after you turn symmetry off to scale something that you remember to turn it back on again when you're using the brushes because otherwise, your UV map will end up asymmetrical, and that's not ideal. So that's, like, the main areas of the head more or less cleaned up. So now I can move on to closing up the eye sockets. Because you don't need that much space for the inside of the eye sockets on the UV map, right? The inside of the eye sockets isn't visible usually because you have an eyeball in the way. So I don't want to be wasting pixels on that part. I'd much rather dedicate that space to the eyelids. So I'm just closing up the eyes here in the UV map using the move topological brush, and then smoothing out around the area that I've closed up to make sure that, you know, stuff is nice to smooth, and there's no, really severe warping. And uneven polygons. Then later on in three D sax, I'll also be able to straighten this area out a little bit more with the tools I have in three DS MAX. So there's the eye holes closed up. Now I can sort of stretch out in a few areas around the face in that area, too, and moving on to the nose here. I'm also going to scale down the inside of the nostrils because that's also not such an important area. So you don't want that much text space for the inside of the nostrils. But the inside of the nostrils is still a little bit more visible than the eye socket. Sometimes you will um, you know, see the side of the inside of the nostril or something like that. So you do want to leave a little bit of UV space there. Don't scale it down to nothing. And now I'm going to mask out the entirety of the nose and scale up the entire end of the nose. And the reason why you need to do this is because if you imagine the nose sticks outwards a lot, it's generally, you know, a shape that sticks outwards a lot. And if you squash that down into a two D view in the UV map, you can imagine how much sort of texture space you're squeezing down there by transforming a shape into a two D UE map. So that's why you need to dedicate a lot more space for the nose in the UV map compared to other parts of the face. You just need to scale it up like 50% more than everything else. After I scaled up the nose, I scaled down the nostrils again because they got scaled up together with the rest of the nose, so I still want them to keep them quite small, but I want the rest of the nose to be pretty big. And just using the move topological brush and the smooth brushes to sort of even things out and pull them around a little bit. When it comes to the mouth, what most people do, myself included, is to have the place where the lips meet together as a completely straight line. That makes painting textures on the lips and substance painter a little bit easier if that area is a straight line. So I straighten it out as much as I can with the move topological brush. Here, and later on, I'll make it completely straight through S MAX. And what I'm doing now is I've masked out the entire mouth, and I'm going to move it down slightly just so there's a little bit more texture space between, you know, the nose and the start of the mouth. Again, just giving more space to the head on the UV map because I don't need much space for the neck, but it doesn't make sense for me to pull the entire face down and it. So I can do that by slightly pulling down the mouth. And since I pulled the mouth down a bit and I also scaled it up, I'm just going to use the move topological brush and the smooth brush to sort of move things around to compensate for that. So this is a pretty rough start. I've sort of moved the main things I want around here. So what I can do now is unflatten and take a look at how this looks in three D. So you can see the letters on the face are quite a bit smaller than the ones on the back of the head, but it's really hard to tell with this UE map. It's just too big to really be able to tell what's going on here. So what I'm going to do is just use the default Zbrush one. You can find it right here. In this panel, you don't have to import everything. And I actually found that this one works way better than the one I imported. So you can actually skip the entire step of importing a texture map. So now you can see very obviously how much bigger or how much smaller the letters on the face are compared to the side of the head, and that's exactly what I want to see. I want the sides of the head to be lower resolution than the face. So I do see a few things that I do want to tweak a little bit here. You can see that the grid squares along the side of the head are a little bit wonky. So that's something I'm going to want to smooth out a little bit when I get back to the two D view. Also, if I look at the actual front of the face, I can see that there's a little bit of warping in the front to the cheek area around the nose. So maybe I'll try and smooth that out if possible. Some of these things you really can't fix just because of, you know, there is some warping that is going to stay there because of, you know, you're just trying to squeeze something that's very shapely into a two D plane. So, of course, there is going to be a little bit of warping, but, you know, it's a good idea to try and reduce that as much as possible. Now, what you can see here is that symmetry sort of broke here because as you flatten and unflatten sort of resets the position of all of your UV islands in three space. So because I move the ears off to the side, it's sort of put all of my UVs off center. So to fix that, what I'm going to do is instead of moving them off to the side, I'm going to move the ears down below the face. And if I unflatten and flatten again, now you can see that all of my UVs are in the correct spot again, and I can use symmetry again. So that's how you fix that issue if you run into that. Now I'm just using the smooth brush around the cheek area to see if that helps at all. And it doesn't really look like it's changed much at all. So I think I'm just going to have to leave that area as it is. When it comes to organic UVs, you can get away with a lot of stretching, really, especially compared to stuff like fabric where you don't want the fabric weave to be too stretched out. When it comes to organic things like the face or creatures and stuff like that, you are going to end up with warping because you don't want to put a lot of seams on organic areas. There's not really a lot of space or ways to hide them in those areas. Especially on something like the face, which is something you're going to be looking at a lot. You don't want any seams around the front of your face. So it is inevitable that some areas end up a little bit warped in the UV map, but that's absolutely fine because as long as you have the resolution to compensate for that, a little bit of warping does not hurt at all. What I'm doing now is moving up the neck a little bit because I don't need that much UV space for the neck. But really, this isn't something that I needed to do because at the end of the day, the only thing I'm going to be having in this texture map is the face. So I may as well utilize the entire UV square, and there's no sense trying to squash this face down vertically. I did at one point try and fit the arm texture in with the face, but there's just no way it fits in there, so I ended up having to leave it separately. But yeah, when it comes to your face UVs, just try and maximize the use of this UV square for the entire face. You usually don't want to try and squeeze other stuff in there. You want to keep your face really as high resolution as you can. So I just moved the ears off to the side just so I could have a little bit more space for the face. You really don't care about the top of the head and the sides of the head because they're going to be covered up by hair, anyway. So I really don't need that resolution there. If I unflat if I unflaten again and take another look, I can see that yeah, the face is looking pretty good now, so I can go ahead and do my final tweaks in threeSMX. So I'm just going to export this entire head as an OBJ and then head into three DSMX. I want to make sure I'm not triangulating or doing anything like that on import. I want to have the same aquads I had when I exported. One issue I did run into when I re Imported the head was that was slightly offset in the Y direction. Now, I'm not 100% sure why this is. It might be a result of master slightly translating the head when you flatten and unflatten it, or maybe just moved it a little bit by accident in Zbrush maybe accidentally moved the entire head. I'm not 100% sure, but in this case, it was an easy fix. So what I did was I set the pivot point to a vertex. I could easily identify on both models. And once the pivot point was set like that, I could just snap the entire model to that vertex on the original low poly object and very easily move this head back to where it was meant to be. So yeah, turn on snaps and snap to vertex in three D and turn on effect pivot only and snap your pivot point to a vertex you can easily identify on both models. So in my case, I chose the tip of the nose. It does take me. I do end up messing around a little bit here, so bear with me until I, you know, hide everything and figure out this scene a little bit. So I've got effect pivot turned on, and I've got snaps turned on as well, and I'm just dragging it into the tip of the nose. And once I have it snapped to the tip of the nose, turn off affect pivot only, and I turn on visibility for the original head. That wasn't the head, that's the shoulder. There is the actual head. And with snaps still turned on, I can just drag my imported head and drag it to that vertex on the low poly moodel and it can help to turn on transparency mode so you can better see what you're doing here and make sure you're snapping it to the exact same vertex on both models, you can see here now the head is in the exact same position as it was before I exported it. It's in the exact same position as the original head. That's how you fix this issue, and that's going to be all for this chapter. I'm just going to keep this chapter as everything I did in Zbrush and then do the final tweaks in the next chapter just so it's very easy to find the content of this episode and you don't have to sort through a chapter with a bunch of different things covered in it. So this is going to be a very short chapter, and I'm ending it here, and I'll see you in the next one. 52. 12 Finalizing Head Uv's And Baking: This is Chapter 12 of UV mapping and baking. In the last chapter, I did the majority of what I'm going to need to do for the face UVs in ZBrush. In this chapter, I'm just going to be finishing up and tweaking all of the UVs I've imported from Zbrush. So the first thing I need to do is turn the UV the right side up again because like I said, in the last chapter, what Zbrush does is it flips your UVs upside down. So back in three years Max, I need to flip them back the right way up. And you want to make sure that your UVs aren't inverted or flipped. So take a look at the letters on your texture checker and make sure they are facing the right direction. I'm straightening out the bottom and the sides, so they're nice and neat and straight. I'm going to do a little bit of relaxing or smoothing with the relax tool. And you'll notice that I'm only working on one side of the head, and that's because there is a tool in text tools to mirror all of your UVs on an object. So I only need to do all of these tweaks for one side of the mesh. I don't need to worry about mirroring anything until I'm finished with them on one side. So I'll be showing that a little bit later. What I'm doing now is I'm moving the neck down a little bit because I decided that I may as well give that area a little bit of extra space because I'm not saving anything by squashing the head UVs down and just not using that space on the texture sheet, right? So I may as well extend them down a bit and utilize all of the space on the texture sheet, even if the neck isn't such an important area. There's no reason to squash it down for no reason. Because either way, that texture space is available on the UV sheet, so I may as well utilize it and make the shape of this entire unwrap of the head more square as opposed to being squashed upwards and more rectangular. I'm just undoing what I did in Zebras, which was squash the entire neck upwards quite a lot. I've just gone and pulled it back down again a little bit. And I'm straightening up the sides a bit again. And just in general, I'm going to be going through and straightening out a lot of these areas that I couldn't straighten out in ZBrush because there's no really handy straighten tool in Zbrush like there is in three SMAX. So you sort of have to remember what tools are available to you in every piece of software and, you know, utilize all of them in the process, right? So in Zbrush, I can very easily move around the UV. And manipulate them. But in the DS Max, I have access to all of the alignment and straightening tools. So, you know, I do the bulk of the work in Zbrush, and then I align things and straighten them out in the S MAX. And that's the way you want to approach it, right? Make the best use of every piece of software for every part of the process you're working on. Now, it's not super important that you straighten out every single, you know, part of the mouth and the eyelids, but it's something I like to do to keep the UV unwrap a little bit more neat. And the same applies to the sides of the head and the bottom of the neck, stuff like that, or the ear holes, I guess it is optional if you want to leave them slightly wonky or if you want to use the align tools to straighten them out. I like to have my UV mats nice and neat, and I feel like it's a little bit more professional looking, so that's why I go through and straighten these things out. I guess if you're feeling lazy, it won't really impact the quality of your bakes and stuff like that that much if you leave them wonky. So yeah. I'm not going to say it's optional or anything like that. I just like mine to be nice and neat and straight. If you don't like that, then I guess you can leave them as they are. But it doesn't take too long to straighten these things out, and I feel like it does make the UV map look a little bit more professional. So do with that what you will. Now I'm using text tools, and I'm going to use them to mirror the UVs of this head. So there is a mirror button right there on the menu, and if you click it, it will go through and symmetrize every single vertex of the UU app. This does take a few minutes, and you saw my viewport went black as it was doing that because it is a little bit resource heavy. So yeah, don't be alarmed if your screen freezes when you use that button. And another thing I should note about it is sometimes it will either, you know, freeze three Max, get it to be non responsive, or if you have a vertex selected on your UV map for some reason, and you click either the textol shortcut or the unwrapper sometime or the mirror tool, sometimes it will mess up your UVs and you'll have to undo. So the tool is slightly unpredictable like this, but, you know, just either save right before you use it or add another edit normals modifier, just so you can go back to the previous one in case it messes something up, or just be aware that you might need to undo if something goes wrong and, you know, it's not a big deal just undo and try again. So I'm moving around the corner of the nose here just to see if I can straighten some of these grid squares on the Ump out a little bit, just to have them a little bit less warped here in this area. Again, it's not going to be possible to make the entire face completely square grid squares because at the end of the day, this entire thing is a little bit deformed because of how much I've scaled up the face compared to other parts and the nose and all that stuff. So it is entirely normal that some of these grid squares look a little bit stretched out, and it's important not to have them too stretched out. To the extent where it will be very visible that you have sort of elongated, stretched out pixels in your texture in that area when you're looking at them in the three D view. But especially with organic objects like a face or like a creature part or something like that, you do have quite a bit of tolerance as to how much stretching and defamation you are allowed in your UE maps. So don't be alarmed by, you know, non square looking grid on the texture checkers when you're checking out your UVs. So I'm moving on to the ears now, and I'm just going to split off the back half of the ear just so these unwraps are a little bit less squashed up when it comes to the inner side of the ear. And I'm going to do the same thing for the other ear as well. And I'm just going to be using quick peel for these ears. I'm not going to be manually using the peel tool or manipulating them manually. Otherwise, I think a quick peel does a good enough job on these ears. If I look at the area deformation view, the inside of the ear is slightly pink, and the outside is slightly blue, but it's not like a bright blue or bright red, so there's no major defamation or distortion going on there. And if I look at it in a three D view, I look at the actual size of the grid squares, and if any of them are distorted too badly, it actually looks quite good in there. So yeah, just a quick peel seems to do a good enough job. And just splitting off the back of the ear sort of helps with, you know, the sort of outer edge of the ears being much higher in textile density than the inside. So by splitting them up into a slightly smaller chunk that seems to, you know, get the job done perfectly fine. You don't really need to worry about ears too much because they're not a major focal point. What I'm messing around here a little bit is trying to fit the top of the shoulder in with the rest of the head, because, of course, ideally, I would like all of my skin textures to be in one material group. And I was hoping I could find a way to fit these two things in together. But, yeah, it really was unlikely that I was going to be able to do this. I of course, I can scale the shoulder down a little bit compared to the face because, you know, I don't need that much textile density just for the shoulder area, but I can't scale it down too much either way. But at the end of the day, there really was no way to fit both of these things in together. Um, yeah. So unfortunately, you know, I did spend a few minutes trying to find a way to fit the shoulder in with the head. I tried moving the neck upwards a little bit on the head and all sorts of stuff like that. And I mean, it's obvious now that I'm looking at the footage that this was never going to fit, but I really wanted to try it anyway because, you know, it would have been nice to have been able to include all of the skin objects in one material. Unfortunately, I just ended up leaving the shoulder as its own material. Which maybe isn't the most ideal setup. Usually on a character, you'll have a little bit more exposed skin than just a shoulder. If there is exposed skin, like you might have hands as well if the character doesn't have gloves or maybe shorts or maybe both sleeves are visible. Both arms are visible, stuff like that. This is a bit of an unusual situation where it's just the top of the shoulder visible, so it makes it a little bit tricky to figure out what to do with. One thing I could have done, of course, it was to include it with another material. So I could have put it in with maybe the accessories or the mechanical arm. And in that case, you still would want a separate material for the shoulder. But what you can do is have that material share the same textures as another material. So you can apply the material same textures to maybe like a mechanical md material, which would have a metalness value and all that kind of stuff. And then apply the same textures to a skin shader material, and that would have subsurface scattering and all of that. So they're sharing a material that's a little bit more efficient than having individual textures for both the shoulder and maybe some other material group like mechanic alarm or something like that. I didn't end up doing this simply because I forgot to pack in this top of the shoulder with any other material group. It sort of got left behind, and I ended up deciding that it wasn't worth redoing a bunch of stuff just to include it. So yeah, this shoulder ended up sort of being all by itself in one material group. Overall, that might not be the most efficient setup for the different materials, but it's also not terrible either. It is okay to just have you know, if you only have one section of skin on the body and there's nothing really you can think of to grip it to, it is okay to just have an individual texture set for that. As long as you show an understanding for packing different materials and textures together in the rest of all of the UV maps and the way you've split up the materials, like, it's not really going to look bad in a portfolio or anything like that. So the setup I ended up with was okay. It maybe could have been slightly better if I decided to include this shoulder with some other material, but, you know, what I went with just having the shoulder by itself, it's okay, too. So, yeah. I'm almost done messing around with the shoulder here, and I'm just going to undo all of the stuff I did to the face UV map right now. Maybe if you have a slightly different situation, maybe you have just maybe a smaller patch of skin visible then you could fit it in with the rest of the head, like I tried to do here. But in my case, you know, the shape was such that I couldn't get it to fit. Maybe if I cut the shoulder in half, it would have been impossible, but you generally don't want to have UV seams in visible areas across skin. So yeah, I just smoothed out the top of the head on one side and then used the mirror modifier to fix it up. And I'm just going to have this head with the ears, and that's the only things I'm going to have in this texture. And that's the usual setup for a face texture is to just include the face and, you know, the ears. And that's about it. That's the only things you want in your face texture set. So I'm messing around a little bit with the vertices around the neck. You can see they're a little bit uneven there and stretched out a little bit too much. So I can move a lot of this stuff down just a tiny bit. And also, I can move the neck down overall because I do have leftover space in this texture sheet, and I may as well use all of it so there's no reason to keep the neck squashed down when I still have vertical space in this texture sheet at the end of the day, I have to work with a square. So, you know, just because I have empty space leftover, you know, doesn't mean anything that doesn't do me any good. So I just stretch the neck down a little bit just to use that extra space up. And what I have leftover gives me, you know, plenty of room to still fit these ears in and sort of space them out appropriately. And that's going to how I'm going to leave the face UVs. I'm pretty happy with these. They're nice and square and there's plenty of room for the face. And if I look at the three D view, the texture checker, it looks pretty smooth and nice. So yeah, I highly recommend using Z brush for face unwraps because it's really the easiest way to get the sort of face area in the shape you want it. Just using those brush tools makes it so much easier in Z brush. Now I'm going to apply the materials that I need to the rest of the body. So material one separate material for the shoulder, and then one for the sleeve underneath. And I also am going to do a few tweaks to the shoulder UVs. If you look at the bottom of the UV editor, you can see there's this little drop down menu where you can select which material ID you're working with. So that way you can isolate UV one material ID at a time or one material at a time and edit every single material you have on an object individually instead of having them all jumbled up at once on your screen. So remember that drop down menu. That's very useful when you have an object with multiple materials applied to it. Now, I'm just going to use the Peel tool to slightly move the shoulder around and, you know, make sure I can use as much of this UV square or this texture map as possible. I did notice a little bit of an issue with the low poly here. Some of these edges are moved forward diagonally a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and in edit polymode just sort of move them back with edge constraints turned on and sort of align them to the edge loops that lead up to them. And this looks a lot better than what they were before. They were really pushed off to the side, and that didn't look very good at all. So I'm adding my unwrapped UVW modifier back and isolating that material idea with a little drop down menu I told you about earlier. And now I'm just going to use Peel mode to try and sort of maneuver this around and see how I can use as much of this UV space as possible. So the first thing I tried was straightening out the bottom to see if maybe that way I could, you know, somehow pull it up and take up the whole texture map, texture square. But that didn't really work out. So I reset all of the points. Just cleared all of the peel map points and then did a quick peel to reset everything. And, you know, I decided that this is pretty much as good as you're going to have with this part. If I were to manipulate it a little bit more and sort of try and stretch it out over the whole UV square, the amount of distortion I would have in the UV map would basically outweigh any sort of textile density benefits I would gain from, you know, trying to fill out the entire UV square. So it really isn't worth doing. What I'm doing now is I'm just exporting out my entire low poly and I've imported it into Mam Z toolbg as well as the high poly for the skin. I did that off camera so you didn't have to just watch me import things over again and set up the baking group all over again. There's only two objects in here, so there's no reason to really go into how I set up the baking group. It's the same thing I did for the body, really, just even more simple. So I have the skin material with a red color here, and the shoulder is in pink, and I'm not going to be baking the accessories now, so they don't really matter at all, or the sleeve I mean by accessories. So there's my high poly. I have all of the textures from Z brush applied to it as well because this high poly comes with the base mesh textures from a scan. So those are going to be really useful when it comes to texturing skin. It'll be a good starting point. I'm going to turn off accessories in the baking texture sets to be baked because I don't want to bake them right now. I just want to bake the skin parts. The sleeves, which in this case, have the accessories material applied to them are going to be with a different material entirely. So I'm not touching them right now. I've made a new output folder for everything that I'm going to be baking right now, and I'm naming all of my output skin so I know what they are. And I'm going to hit bake to do a quick test bake, see what I'm getting. So let me hide my high poly and take a look at the results. So I'm just going to apply the face one to the face and the shoulder one to the shoulder. And I'll change the colors up a little bit to make it easier to see what's going on here because the bake on the face, of course, is very subtle. It's really just poor detail than I'm baking down. So it's very subtle, and it can help to set up a material that lets you see all of the normals a little bit better from your bake result. Another thing that can help is to bake out an ambient occlusion map. Or when it comes to faces, what's even better is baking out a cavity map because that will only highlight your pores in the bake, whereas ambient occlusion is more likely to only pick up secondary forms and not just all the tiny tertiary detail. So if I slot this cavity map into the roughness channel, that will really highlight all of the poor detail that's baked out because I can use that to sort of make the insides of the pores very rough and then the surface still glossy. And I can also plug that into ambient occlusion, and you can see how that looks. And if I head back to the roughness map property, I can set the roughness to a mid value and invert it. And you can see the skin has stayed glossy, but the insides of the pores are not rough, or rather they are rough. And if I go into render passes, it will be a little bit more clear. So if I go into material values and roughness, you can see the pores are showing up in white, which is, you know, a rough value. And it's really highlighting all of the detail in this bake, and it's really turned out quite well. This is 28 2048 in terms of texture resolution, and all of the pores are holding up. It doesn't really look that blurry. So yeah, this is a really good bake, aside from the obvious clipping issues in the baking cage, which I am going to have to sort out in a minute. Now taking a look at the shoulder, it looks like there isn't any detail here at all. So I'm thinking there's probably something wrong with the high poly here. So if I take a look at the high poly, I can see that there's no poor detail on here at all either. And I'm going to check the wire frame here in a minute. So if you head up to the little COG up there, you can change your viewport settings and you can turn on the Y frame. And I can see that I've accidentally mixed in a low poly model with all of my high poly models. So I'm going to quickly go into ZBrush and re export the high polys for the arm and reimport them. But I'm going to do all of that off screen because, you know, this is a very straightforward thing, and I don't want to put you through going into ZBrush and selecting this object and re exporting it, right? You already know how to export things from ZBrush. So I exported out the actual high poly for the arm off screen here, and I've just re imported it, and I'm dragging it into the high baking group. And it has the face material applied to it right now. So that's why it looks like that. If I apply the neutral clean material to it, it looks like this. And if I bake again, hopefully now my bake will have actual detail on it. So let me hide the high poly and take a look at the low poly again. And, yep, I have all of the poor, all of the skin texture detail on here, and it looks pretty good. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the results so far. I can do the same thing I did for the face material with the arm. I mean, set up the cavity maps for the roughness and the occlusion to really bring out those details and take a look at them. And yeah, you can see that all the detail from the high poly is definitely there, and it really pops out once you set up that roughness and cavity map. Or rather apply the cavity into the roughness map. It's a great way of checking for all of the detail. Now I am going to adjust the max offset, and hopefully this will solve all of the issues of the baking cage and all that stuff. The lips look pretty good. I might try and paint them out a little bit. I'm not sure if that's just what they look like on the high poly or if there is a tiny bit of clipping towards the inner corners of the mouth. So I am going to paint over the mouth a little bit with a low offset value, just on the very inside of the mouth and see how that looks. So this was clearly a little bit too much because now this is actually clipping through the surface of the lips. So I'm going to bring that value up a little bit and see if this is an improvement. I'm going to try and keep the value for the very middle edge quite low, just to not have the top lip baking onto the bottom lip and vice versa. But that was still a little bit too low, so I'm still having a little bit of clipping into the bottom lip here, so I'm just going to increase the value again and increase it further around the outer side and see how this looks. And now it looks pretty good. So I think that's going to be good enough. What I'll do is also bake out an ambient clusion map and apply that and see how the line between the lips looks with the ambient oclusion applied. With that extra shadowing, see how it turns out, and I need to apply the correct ambient occlusion map to the shoulder. Right now I have the one from the face applied. But there's not really too much ambient occlusion going on with the shoulder, maybe a little bit with the armpit, but it's not super important right now. There's a little bit of clipping on the top of the shoulder here. So I need to go ahead and paint that out. There's a drop down menu on the top right corner of the Bake offset menu here, where you can select which material group you're working with. And that's how you get access to the different material groups you have. So I'm just going to slightly offset the top of the shoulder. And blur it out a little bit. So what can happen if you have very steeply stepped offset values with your objects. With your baking cage it can cause skewing, which is something you kind of want to avoid. So, you know, try not to have values going from a sharp white down to a dark gray when you're painting your offsets. It can help to blow edges out. But that's not too common of an issue. And, of course, I want the cage distance to be pretty low around the armpit because I don't want the sides of the arm baking onto the inside of the arm just checking the actual normal map errors. It looks really good, it's nice and purple, not too many gradients or anything like that. So these turned out really well. So now that I've made sure that all of my bakes are coming out correctly, I've corrected any sort of clipping issues around, like what I had the ears and the mouth, and I've made sure that I've got all of my high poly objects in the right place, so this shoulder is baking correctly. Basically, all of my bakes are coming out as well as I could hope for. It's time to move on to the final baking parts and set up my final baking options. So one thing I want to do when it comes to these Hypoli meshes is bake out the albedo or all of the colors that I have on the hypolobjects. So if I take a look at the material applied to the shoulder, I actually have a texture map that came from the original base mesh, right? Because the base mesh was a scan, and they've also scanned in the albedo. So this is really nice, accurate color information that's going to give me a head start when it comes to texturing the shoulder, and the same goes for the face. Now, when it comes to the face, a little bit of vertex painting was done in brush as well to add this eyeliner and to paint out the eyebrows. So, you know, that's even better. And what I did in sea Brush was I actually baked out those vertex colors to a texture. Now, while I could bake that texture down, just the exact same way I did I'm going to do with the shoulder, right? So just use the texture I baked out in Zbrush where I converted all of the poly paint data into a texture in Zbrush. I would much rather prefer if I could bake out the vertex color directly because right now what's going to happen is, you know, if I converted poly paint to a texture in Zbrush and then I'm baking that texture into another texture, that's like a copy of a copy. And it's also kind of limited by the actual resolution of the texture, right? So instead, it would be better to take that primary vertex color information and bake it directly instead of making a copy of a copy. So if you take a look at the albedo slot in your materials, this is the material that is applied to the high poly of the skin. I'm looking at the high poly object right now. So there's a little drop down menu here, and you can select vertex color instead. And this will apply your vertex color to the model. Now, what's going on here now it's become a lot darker is because the vertex color has been applied on top of the albedo map. So I'll want to disable the albedo map, and here I am back at the original color. You want to keep SRGB on most likely because usually you will have your vertex colors in SRGB if you've been doing poly paint in zebrush. But sometimes you may want it in linear if you've been painting masks or something, but that's not our case right here. So this is what you want to set up to make out the vertex color from the face. Now, when it comes to the actual baking options, I'm going to turn them all up to four k, even though the shoulder probably won't need four k. I also want multiple texture sets turned on. I think I already did that before then. And the format, you can turn it up to 16 bits per channel, and the samples up to 16 as well. And I usually apply a low soften value. And when it comes to the maps, I'm configuring, I will want normals, object normals, position, height isn't very useful unless you're going to be using a displacement map, which I won't of these, basically, thickness you also want just for sometimes it helps with subsurface scattering and masking that off. I don't really need bent normals and I want two ambient occlusion maps. I'll explain that a little bit in a second. In this case, I don't really need material ID. But down here, I will want albedo because I will be baking from the albedo texture on the shoulder and I will want vertex color because I'm going to be baking for from the faces vertex colors. These are all of the maps I want. And I'm just going to turn them all on. So the last thing I need to talk about here is the two ambient occlusion map pigs. So as usual, I have got one set up with ignore roots turned off, and the other one with it turned on. That's the only real reason why you bake two ambient occlusion maps so you can have that option on or off. And that's why I have all of these high polymshs imported. Basically, I want to bake out an ambient occlusion map that has contact shadows between these parts and the skin because, you know, it may be useful in either rendering or texturing. So I've picked out all of the objects from the high poly that come into contact with the skin. So the vest, this pocket sleeve thing. I didn't bother imposing the armband because the armband actually goes over the sleeve, so I don't need that part, the earrings and this hoodie. So I'm going to take all of these high polymshes, and I don't want to put them into the high poly folder because if you think about it, they will end up getting baked down onto the surface, and I don't want that. So I'm going to need a new baking group for them. And I can drag them all into this new baking group. But even this isn't ideal because what I found is that a baking group won't work if it doesn't have any low poly objects in it. So what I'm going to have to do is duplicate the low poly, not delete. Let me undo that. Let me duplicate the low poly and drag it into the low poly of the second baking group. So, yeah, that's the only way I found to get this sort of setup to work where you have some extra high poly objects that you only want for the second ambient occlusion map bake. You don't need them for anything else. You don't need them to bake in normals or colors. What I would have expected to work is to just have a bake group with only them in the high poly area of the baking group. But when I tried it, it didn't work, and this only worked when I had the low poly in there as well. So that's why you need to duplicate the low poly and put it into the low zone of this baking group as well. So with that, I should be set to bake out all of the maps. So I'm just going to hit bake again and see what comes out. So here's the result of the bake, and I can immediately see one more issue that's popped up, and that is the very top of the shoulder. This part that actually on the high poly belongs to the rest of the head, if I show you a high poly here, you see that this section that hasn't baked out that actually belongs to the head has just baked as white. And I actually know why this is. It's because on the high poly, for the head, I set it to vertex color, and I completely disabled the Albedo map. Uh, because with it enabled, it sort of doubles up the colors and kind of looks bad, so I thought I should disable it because I'm going to be baking the vertex color from the face. But I didn't take into account the fact that I was still going to be baking the albedo color for the top of the shoulder here because for the shoulder, I want albedo, for the face, I want vertex color. So I'm just going to enable albedo map and on the face texture. And even though this looks, you know, the colors are doubling up, so it looks bad on the high poly, it will still bake out fine. Because when it bakes, it treats albedo and vertex color in the baker separately. So it will still look fine. So I'm actually going to disable all of the other maps and just leave albedo and go ahead and bake that out. And I'll see what kind of result I get this time. So let me take a look at the low poly and how this has turned out. And now I can see that the top of the shoulder looks almost perfect. There's a tiny bit missing there, but, you know, that's just a result of, you know, missing. Maybe I didn't quite paint out the offset map perfectly. I'm going to leave these *** as these are because I don't want to go through recording myself baking again. In your own time, you might want to actually, you know, fix this. But for me, this will be fine. And, yeah, this is how your bakes should look. This is, you know, I've walked you through the entire baking process for the skin here, all of the maps you need to bake out. And yeah, that's going to be all for this chapter. We're done with baking the skin. Actually, one thing I can show you is I've inputed the low poly of the body and set up all of the maps I baked for that part. So here is a skin with the body that I've already baked, and it's all looking pretty good now, and the characters slowly starting to come together. Another thing I can highlight is the difference between the two ambient clusion maps I baked out. So you can see here that this is the regular one with ignore groups turned off, and this is the one with ignore groups turned on. So I have a little bit of shadow being cast from the whole neck covering thing, and I have a shadow from the pocket on the shoulder here as well. I can actually apply that and show you how it looks. So you can see it might be desirable to have a little bit of this shadowing around the sleeve holes here. If I turn it off and on again, you can see it really gets rid of a bit of that sharpness. And if I actually turn on the high poly for these parts, you can see it actually looks pretty good to have a little bit of this shadow. I may want to tone it down a little bit in my render settings and stuff like that, or, you know, maybe adjust it otherwise, but it's always good to have these extra maps baked out, and I'll do the same for the face as well. So let me drag this ambient inclusion map onto the face. And you see there's a little bit of extra shadowing in that area now that isn't there usually. So that's why you may want to, you know, bake out both of those ambient clusion maps. And that's going to be all for this chapter. I've walked you through the entire baking process and all the things that I've had to adjust and fix as I've gone along. And yeah, that's going to be all for this one. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 53. 13 Finishing Pouch Uv's And Lowpoly: Welcome to Chapter 13 of UV mapping and baking. So I'm done with the body and skin, and it's time to move on to what I'm calling the accessories material group. Now, if you'll remember back when I was doing the retopo, I actually only did the retopo for one of these pouches. So one of them is actually missing from the low poly. The reason why I did that is because I wanted to do the UVs for ply of the pouch first and then duplicate it and finalize it. So I don't have to do the UVs twice, once for each one. I just do the retarpo and the UVs for one of them, and then I can duplicate it and slightly adjust it to fit exactly with the second pouch high poly. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is finalize all of the UVs for the pouch on the right here, which is the one that's finished. And then I'll be able to duplicate the low poly and move it off to the side. What I'm doing here is just detaching the high poly of the pouch so I can isolate it and, you know, work with it a little bit more easily that way and not have all the other stuff get in the way when I'm trying to work in the viewport. So I've just added an unwrapped UVW modifier, and I'm going to start marking out my seams, using the high poly to know where I want to put my seams because I'm following the fabric seams on the high poly to know where I'm putting my seams on the low poly. So same stuff I did for the body retpper basically just using the seam marking tools and then the peel tools once I've marked out the seams where I want them to be. If you're struggling to find the edge which you're missing when you're trying to split on an island and, you know, you keep not being able to find it, what you can do is just quick peel the entire island, and then in the two D view, it will be very easy to spot which edges are still connecting the part you want to split off to the rest of the UV. And what I noticed here was that there was an edge missing from the low poly. So I'm just going to have to collapse my modifier stack and cut that edge back in. You can see I probably missed this when I was doing the retppo, so I'm going to cut that back in, and I'm also going to use conform doors to snap that vertex back to the high poly and this should be good. So I'm going to add the UV modifier back and get back to doing the UVs. So I'm going to split this off from the rest of the islands now. And I basically want to split every single panel of fabric that makes up this little pouch into its own UV island, basically the same thing I did for the rest of the clothes that I've done so far. Now, when it comes to the lid of the pouch, you can see there is a little bit of a seam that goes down the middle of it, but I don't really have an edge that's right on top of it. I didn't want to add extra geometry over there because it felt like it would be a little bit too much. So in this case, I'm not going to have a seam that follows the high poly exactly, but it will be close enough, and I will be probably able to texture around it. This is a very minor area, so it won't present a huge issue, I don't think. And, yeah, this is pretty much stuff that you've seen me do before with the pants, just, you know, on a little bit of a smaller scale because this is just a pocket. I'm just going around and marking seams for little straps like this, I just mark them around, you know, the bottom edge where it's less visible. And for other stuff, you know, I just follow the seams of the high poly. So like I did with the pants or, you know, all of the body UVs, right now, I'm just focusing on putting the seams where I want them and just doing a quick peel on everything. Once I have done that, I will be going through and straightening out all of the UV islands. Especially when it comes to all of these accessories, the pouch is included. It's going to be a little bit more important to straighten stuff out here even just because there's going to be so many small parts. And in order to fit them all together very efficiently, it really helps to have them straightened out. So this is probably going to take the longest out of all of the UVs I'm going to be doing just because there's so many small parts. It's going to take a while to straighten out every single small part, and then it's going to take a bit of a while to pack them all together, and troubleshoot all of the baking and stuff like that. So yeah. Larger objects end up taking less time than tons and tons of small little objects just because, you know, you still have to basically mark the same amount of seams, whether it's a tiny little accessory or a very large, you know, pair of pants or something like that. At the end of the day, you need to unfold everything, so doing all of the unwraps for the accessories, it is going to take quite a while just because there's so many different parts. And there's also a lot of straightening out I'm going to have to do. So every single little strap and belt, it's much better if you straighten them out completely straight because then texturing them just becomes so much easier. So it is going to take a little bit of work to get this done. Now, this little strap or bottom of the lid of the pouch was a little bit tricky to figure out where exactly I needed to put the seam to get this to unfold nicely. And in cases like this, you can just put the seam, you know, in a rough spot that you think will help unfold the island more or less and then sort of work from there and straighten out the island a little bit. You don't have to be spot on with the placement of your seams first time around. Times it can help instead to flatten out the UV island as much as possible, just roughly placing the seams where you think they might help. And then once you have it flat in the two D view, that gives you a much better understanding of what you need to do to get the final result you want, because in the two D view, you can really see how stuff connects with each other and how it works in the UV view. And you can refine stuff a lot better from there. So sometimes a good workflow is to just really roughly cut stuff up, just so you can unfold it more or less in the two D view, so it doesn't look like a jumbled mess of edges, and you can start to identify different elements of the UV island and, you know, continue refining it from there. Instead of trying to, like, guess and predict how those UV seams are going to affect stuff and just place them in the three D view, start roughly unwrapping it in the two D view and work and refine from there. So that's going to be the UV placement more or less for that part. And now I'm moving on to the buckle here. Now, for hard surface stuff like this, you can sometimes actually use flatten mapping. And what that will do it will break up the selected object by angles, and you'll get a bunch of tiny little UV islands, and they'll all be pretty flat and broken up by angle. And then from there, you can use the stitch tools to sort of stitch the islands that are broken up too much back together. Or in some cases, maybe some stuff you will want to break up even more, so those you would split apart. But in this case, the flatten mapping tool just broke this object up into way too many islands to be worth, you know, unwrapping this object this way and stitching all of these tiny islands together, would be a massive hassle. So I ended up not using this, but this is one of the options that you can sometimes use. Instead, I just went with the regular way I peel things, which is just to mark out seams with the seam marking tool and use peels from there. That's the way I usually prefer to do things, honestly. I find it easy to mark out seams wherever I need them, even on hard surface objects. It depends on the exact object. In this case, you know, flatten mapping didn't really work out, so I went with this. The other thing you can do is just select faces and the selection Bangle tool can also help speed that up and then just use QuickPeelO you can use the Iron tool in the textols menu as well. That does basically the same thing as QuikPeel as far as I'm aware. It might even just be one of those things. Textols is a very old plugin, and some of the functions in Textols have actually shown up as, you know, default tools in three S Max over the years. So you know, some of the functions in textols are kind of redundant. I'm pretty sure iron and QuickPeel does almost the exact same thing. The algorithm that it works by might be slightly different. So it might be slightly different results, but functionally, it kind of does the same thing. But yeah, you can use the selection by angle option to make it a little bit faster to select the faces you want to quick peel off and then just hit Quick Peel or iron in textols and, you know, split your UV map up. That way, or go with what I'm doing, which is just mark out all of the seams you want manually with edge selections and then quick peel from there. It really depends on what you feel like works for you and what you feel like is fastest for you. Alright I like selecting edges and just using appeal tools most of the time. So I'm just using the align horizontal tools to straighten this UV island out. I'm not sure if I've mentioned before, but there are two options when you're using the align vertical and horizontal tools. One of them will align everything you've selected just into one line, and the other one will align each individual element that you've selected into their own line. So make sure you're using the right one for the situation that you're in. Now I'm just using the peel tool to straighten out this strap. The way I work with it is I pin vertices and I sort of align them to the lines of the grid. Very similar to what I did with the body. But when it comes to belts and stuff like this, it's even easier because you just have to align the sides to the grid. And once they're close enough to being straight, I can just use the align tools to straighten them out completely. The reason why I don't just immediately start with using the align tools and I sort of manually straighten stuff up a little bit with the peel tools is because if you hit a very wonky object with the aligned vertical or align horizontal tools, what will happen often is stuff will get squashed and you won't have a consistent textile density across the thing, because if you take something curved and then just immediately squash it into a vertical line, the parts that are sort of curving away more from the vertical end up with less space, right? So you want your object to roughly be straightened out before you actually use the align vertical and horizontal tools to get that final perfectly straight line. So yeah, that's why I don't just immediately use the align tools on a piece that's really wonky. First, I go ahead and I pin a few vertices to make sure that the piece is more or less straight. And once it's 90% of the way there, it's only just a little bit wonky. Then I can use the align tools to get that final very nice straight edge. So, yeah, that's that. Just selecting the vertices on the side here using the line vertical tool, doing the same on the other side. And these are slightly offset vertically, so I'm just going to use the move tool to sort of bring that one down a little bit, and then I'm going to straighten up the top end as well. And I'm actually going to split up the end parts, so they're not welded to each other, and there's a little less stretching around the corners there. Now, this is the back side of the lid, so I'm not really too worried about this part, so I'm just very quickly going to straighten the outer sides with the aligned vertical Horizontal tools and not bother doing anything else for that part. And this little part, I'm just very quickly going to straighten out. You can try using the sort of rectangularized button, but it won't work if you have any triangles. So for stuff like this, it's easiest to just use the expanded loop buttons on the bottom toolbar to, you know, just select a couple edges and expand your selection across all of the vertical or horizontal edges, and then just use the align tools in whichever direction you need. And just lining the edges up on the back side of that. Now, for parts like this that are just completely quads, the rectangularized button will start to work a little bit better. But if you have slanted sides or something like that, then it can also get a little bit more messy. So I find the rectangularized button to be pretty unreliable. But if there's, like, a really simple part that I think it will work on, I'll try it, and, you know, if it does work, then that's great. If it doesn't work, then, you know, I can just undo and then use whichever other tools I think are best for the job. But yeah, it is an option you do have but I really find that it works the way I want it to unless it's a very simple part that's very rectangular. But another thing you have to watch out for when you're using the rectangularize button in the reshape element in the reshape elements tab on the left of the UV Editor here, is that a lot of the time it will sort of move around the edges, and you might end up with some edge loops that are way wider than they're meant to be, and then some edge loops that are way thinner than they're meant to be. And that's a little bit annoying. So be wary when you're using that tool. It doesn't always do the right thing. It's a little bit unreliable, like I said. So just straightening out the sides of this buckle, even though in the in three D, it's, you know, a little bit skewed on the sides. It's kind of like a Rhomboth shape, I guess. I think that's what the shape is called. There's no reason not to straighten it out in the UVs because chances are, you know, I may as well utilize that space. If it's completely rectangular, it's going to be easier to pack around because if I left the sides slightly diagonal, there's still not enough space around them to pack anything meaningful in, so I may as well straighten them out. And, you know, that way, the part gets a tiny bit of extra textal density and also, you know, it's just free space. So if you have parts that are almost, you know, straight on the sides, but maybe they're slightly, um, diagonal or, you know, maybe they get slightly thinner towards the end. You can still keep them completely straight in the UV map, as long as, you know, it's not too severe of a slant or something like that. You can just straighten them out in the UV map. And that way, they get a little bit of extra UV space, and they're a little bit easier to pack around. Now I'm just doing the final pass on this little what's it called? A little strap or Yeah, yeah, something like that. I'm just straightening out the sides, making it so it's going to be easy to pack stuff around it, and that should be good enough. And just a few little things left to clean up here. This is the inside of the loop on the end of that strap. For some reason, all of the different parts of it have come detached, so I'm going to quickly go ahead and stitch them all to each other. Just selecting the edges and using the stitch tool to reattach everything, and then I can finally straighten this part out, and that's all there is for straightening out all of these UVs. So now I can move on to conforming the second pouch to its high poly. Now, if you remember, I made sure that both of these pouches were instances of one another. But now that I want to conform the second one to the high poly, I have to de instance it, make it a unique object. So if you click that little button right that will turn the instances into unique objects, and now any changes you make on them won't propagate to any other instances that there are of it. It's now a unique object, so it's not linked to any of the other instances that there might be anymore. So I can go ahead and detach the hi poly of this pouch. And then just using the conform tools, trag and move all of the vertices to conform to the surface of this one because as you can see, it's just slightly different from the pouch to its left. So it's been mushed around and squished around to benefit on the belt and not be an identical clone of the pouch right beside it. So now I have to do what was done to the high poly, basically, do the exact same thing to low poly, get all of these points and conform to the high poly. So it's not different enough to where I can't use the exact same UVs, right? These aren't major changes, but, you know, there's slight changes in shape that I just have to go through with the conform tools and match on this slow poly. So it's the same as the as a high poly beneath it. So I'm just going around with the drag tool and dragging all the vertices to where they should be. But, you know, I'm not moving them. The changes I have to make aren't significant enough to where they'll really affect how I've UV mapped this part. So yeah, there's no need to worry about the UV mapping getting broken too much as I'm making these changes and moving stuff around. I might have to make a few changes to the geometry because the sides of this pouch are bulged out a little bit. And I just don't have the geometry in this low poly to really support them, and stuff like that. But just adding an edge also doesn't really affect the UV map all that much, and it's an easy fix if it does. So I just have to go through this whole low poly object and make sure everything's aligned. This is a little bit tedious, but, you have stuff like this, there really is no other way to do it. You basically have to do these things twice, but at least I'm not going to have to UV unwrap it twice and straighten out all of those UV islands all over again. That part's already done for the last one, and it will carry over to this one. I just have to go through and line up all of these vertices with the dragged and, you know, in some cases, you might be able to use the conform brushes instead or something a little bit faster. But for a lot of this detailed or very precise corner work, you're just going to have to go through and do it manually, pick up every vertex and put it right where it's supposed to be. Yeah, no other way around it. It's just something you have to put up with. So I'm just going to go around this entire object and snap it to the high poly using all of the conform tools, basically. And then in a few places, I will add an extra edge or two just because in some areas, the high poly on this one is a bit more curved than the other one. And yeah, that's going to be the entire process here. Nothing really new. Just mainly using the drag tool because I need to make sure that every single vertex is in the right spot. And then maybe in some areas, I'll use a soft selection in order to move some larger chunks around, or like I'm doing right now, just select an entire object and move it around manually without any sort of conforms just to get it a little bit closer to where it's meant to be. But overall, it's mostly going to be the drag tool and dragging vertices around. So nothing too interesting I can add on with commentary here. Just, you know, keep on it. I will say that one way you can sort of skip this step or avoid it if you're still in the modeling phase or the sculpting phase is if you're sort of anticipating doing something like this with your high poly where you have two very similar parts, but one of them, you want to shift around a bit and, you know, slightly change the shape of it just so they're not identical, so they don't look like, you know, copies of each other. On the model is what you can actually do while you're still modeling is do the retppo right then while you're still, you know, working on the rest of the high poly. So, you know, sculpt one of these parts, then do the retppo. Then what you can do is attach the low poly to the high poly. In Zbrush if you're using Zbrush to sculpt. And with this combined low and high poly object, you can then do the changes you want to it with, you know, the low poly and the high poly lumped into one. So, you know, you'll be mushing around both the high poly and the low poly at the same time there. And, you know, that way, you're basically doing the exact same changes that you're doing to the hi poly. You're doing those changes to the low poly at the exact same time as well. And that way you can sort of skip having to manually conform the low poly to the second hi poly because you will have done that step already. That might be something that doesn't always work depending on how much you want to change the high poly object. If you really want to, you know, squash it around, you know, very severe or radical way, then, you know, it might not work. But if it's just something like this, then yeah, a trick that I have used a couple of times is to just do the retopo and attach the low poly to the high poly and then sort of squish them around together a little bit, and then you won't have to do this step. But it doesn't always work out that way, and sometimes you can't pre plan these things. So it's fairly common to just have to do this as well. And it's not a big deal, right? I mean, it takes a while to, you know, snap all these vertices back to the high poly, but, you know, it's just half an hour or so of work at the end of the day. So you just have to put up with it, even if it is a little bit tedious. So like I said, there's not too much I can comment on here. I'm just moving stuff around with the form tools. So I mean, I don't have any new commentary to add. So I'll just leave this as a little bit of a time lapse until the end of this chapter where all of the UVs and the low poly for this pouch will be done. And in the next chapter, I'll be moving on to the rest of the UVs for all of the accessories that are going to be going on here. So from here on, it's just going to be a little bit of a time lapse showing me working on this part and snapping all of the vertices to hi poly. But I'm not going to be doing any more commentary because I don't have anything more to say here. Yeah, using the drag tool a bunch. So yeah, enjoy the time lapse, and that's all. An so it took me a little bit of a while to finally finish this up and snap all of these vertices to the hi poly. But I'm finally done with this step, and that's going to be all for this chapter. And in the next chapter, I will be working on the rest of the hi poly, all of the rest of the UVs that make up everything I've lumped into the accessories material. So all the rest of the belts and the gloves and the shoes, all of that stuff. And that's going to be all for this chapter. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 54. 14 Straightning The Accesory Uv's: Hi. This is Chapter 14 of UV mapping and baking. So in this chapter, I'm going to be going through the rest of the accessories. What I'm calling accessories is everything I've put into this material group. So it's like the gloves, belts, the ropes that go on the legs, the boots, all that stuff. I'm going to be going through all of these UV islands and straightening them out so that it's nice and easy to pack them and that when I'm texturing, all of the tiling textures apply to them nicely and all that good stuff. It's very similar to what you saw me do with the pouches and similar to what I did with the body, as well, except in this case, it's a lot of very small parts. So it's just a lot more work, and it's a lot more work on very small little parts. So I'm just increasing my checker tiling here just so I can make sure that the UV islands for the ropes that go on the legs aren't getting messed up when I use the rectangularize button under the reshaped elements tab, because it has a tendency to do that. It can sort of mess with the spacing of the edge loops and really stretch out and warp textures if you use it. So, you know, it's a good idea to scale up your texture checker if you're working on a small part. So that you can actually see the individual letters and grids to make sure that it hasn't messed up your texture. And that goes for, you know, texturing small stuff in general. You want to be able to see, you know, a couple letters or a couple grid squares on the object you're working on in order to be able to verify that it's unwrapped properly because if, you know, one of the texture checker squares is discovering the entire object, that's not giving you any useful information on how the UVs are applied across that object. So straightening out a bunch of belts. You definitely want the sides of belts to be nice and straight. Usually, when you quick peel a belt or something like that, it will sort of come out curved, like a big long C shape or an S shape, you know, just curved in the same direction and the belt is curved in three DU and you definitely don't want to keep them that way. For one, it wastes space on your texture because it's going to be harder to pack things around that curved UV island. And secondly, if you apply some sort of tiling pattern to it in substance painter. So, you know, whether it's just a fabric pattern or some sort of, you know, stripes or something like that, if it's a C shape, then, you know, those patterns will sort of clip off of it diagonally, and it will look really bad in three D view. So you need to straighten it out so that those patterns follow the belt as they would in real life, if the belt was cut from a flat piece of material. So, yeah, that's why all of these belts need to be straightened out and the sides need to be perfectly straight. Otherwise, texturing them will be a nightmare, and it will be really tough to nicely apply textures. So yeah, it's not only just in order to have a nice resolution and, you know, a nice efficient use of el density on my textures that I'm doing these things. It's also so that it's actually, you know, easy to texture or possible to texture properly at all, because if you have really warped messed up islands, you aren't going to be able to apply fabric patterns and stuff like that to these UV islands if they're all messed up. So you need to straighten them out if you want to be able to texture this properly. That's why it's really important to do a good job, especially on things like belts and, you know, long sort of narrow objects like this that are, you know, probably going to have a pattern going all the way across them. You need to straighten all of this stuff. Otherwise, you're you're in for a nightmare when it comes to actually texturing. So for most of these, I'm going to be using the peel mode. It's everything I showed off in the chapter with the body. So all of the setup for that tool that is there and how I explain all of the options and the different functions it has. First thing I do is if the object is slightly wonky, I'll go through and more or less straighten out the ends. So that means just scrapping vertices and moving them so they're in line with one of these grid lines. You know, I'll pick the grid line that is closest and I'll drag a bunch of vertices to it to pin them there. And then once it's more or less straight, then I can just select the entire edge, whether that's just with a box select or by using the grow loop buttons down on the bottom of the two dUV editor. To select all of the edges in one direction, and then all of the edges in another direction and use the edge align tools to straighten them out. Now, you should usually check any changes you've made on the three D model, just looking at the texture checker to see if any of the changes you've made have sort of messed up the rest of the model at all when you're straightening stuff out. You want to make sure stuff isn't really distorted when you're doing these things. This is sometimes a step I'll skip because I sort of have an idea of how the changes I'm making in the two D view are affecting, you know, the three D view, just because I've been doing this for a while, right? But, you're a little bit less experienced, you will want to check the three D view regularly for the changes you've made just to make sure that, you know, while you were straightening stuff out, you didn't go and really distort the UVs too much to where, you know, it might be a problem. So always remember to check your three D view for anything weird going on there. Make sure that most of the squares are more or less squarish, and at least they're consistent and not like sort of stretched in one direction, and then in the other, you know, it is okay to have a little bit of stretching. You're always going to have a little bit of stretching because you're making something that's three D into a two D shape. So, you know, there's always going to be a little bit of distortion where things have to be squashed and stretched into a two D shape. But it's important that it's not too messy, right? So any distortion that there is is more or less just in maybe one direction. So maybe it's just stretched out horizontally or vertically a little bit. You don't want it going back and forth and being like really zigzaggy or something like that, right? You want things to be kind of straightened out. If nothing too crazy going on there. So I'm just going through all of the objects that are more or less rectangular and from the whole pile of UVs at the bottom, and I drag them up to a UV square above everything. And this is where I put all the stuff I clean up and straighten out. I feel like this is a pretty good way to organize your scene when you're working because, you know, you have all the finished parts up here, and then all the other parts you have to work through down below. Instead of leaving everything jumbled up in one pile, and then you can get easily lost with what's finished and what isn't that's something I recommend, as well. Just keep all of the UVs and you haven't touched in one UV grid square and then move the stuff you're working on to another. And yeah, what I like to tackle first is all the rectangular objects, because they're very obvious and straightforward. You know, whatever it's like a little strap or a piece of string, they need to end up being rectangular. So, you know, there's not too much thinking I have to do here. I just mess around with them until they are rectangle. But I am having a little bit of trouble with this knot. And what you saw there to help me sort of straighten it out, because what quick Peel does is it leaves it as a bit of a spiral, is I cut it up into pieces, and that will make it a little bit easier to straighten things out. You can try cylindrical projections, but in this case, it didn't work, so skip that step. But yeah, what helps sometimes is if you break something up into smaller pieces, then the results from quick peel tend to be a little bit more useful. And in general, it's easier to understand what's going on because instead of having something spiral in on itself three or four times, it's only twisting in on itself once. And you can sort of tell what's going on there and very easily pin vertices and pull it back into a straight line that way. Because otherwise, if you have something twisting in on itself several times, then it's a little bit trickier to see what's going on there in the two D view. So if you run into an area like this, the one I'm doing right here, which is a little knot in the string, I would suggest, you know, cut it up into smaller sections and then straighten them out individually, and then you can just stitch them together, and it really makes it a lot easier than if you were to do everything in one go. So that's this piece. Also, what you can use is the relax brush to slightly relax things out a little bit. Sometimes it's a little bit slow to work on screen. It's just not super responsive all of the time. So be aware of that. But it is useful for sometimes relaxing out some of the edges that might be a little bit jumbled up after you do things like this. So I'm doing the same thing I did for the first segment to this second segment. And the reason why Quick Peel isn't really giving me a workable result is because this is a knot. So it twists in itself very severely and Quick Peel can't straighten something like that out very easily. So by splitting it up into smaller chunks, like I said, and using the peel tools, I can straighten this out just like every other piece I want to straighten out. And, you know, that's the way I approach things like this. It is a little bit hard to see through all of the pins. I'm not 100% sure if there's a way to hide pins. I don't think there is. So yeah, it's a little bit of an annoying issue with three DS Max's UI, but that's how it is. You sort of have to get used to being able to see through the pins. It can help to scale up the island you're working on if you really need to do some detailed work, scale it up and the pins will get smaller in proportion. But um yeah, they do tend to get in the way if you have a lot of them. Like if you pin all of the vertices on the sides using the align vertical and horizontal tools, and yeah, they will clutter up your screen a little bit. So, you know, it's just something you have to deal with. So now I can go ahead and weld the two ends of this string together. The tool is being a little bit stubborn, but it ends up welding them in the end. And I have one more segment of this piece of string to weld up. And yeah, little If you check how small this object is in three D view, it does take a little bit of a disproportionate amount of effort to get it nicely straightened out. And that's unfortunately often how it is with these things with these small objects, especially something that's, like, tied up into a knot. It takes a while to do, and it's really tiny. So yeah, you just have to make sure you don't get too annoyed and fed up with the process while you're doing. But straightening all of these out and doing them properly, firstly, it'll look a lot more professional, and it will make everything just slightly easier when it comes to texturing, and it all looks slightly better in the end. So it's worth the effort to straighten all of these things out. Um, just go through every single item systematically and just I mean, it doesn't take too long to do each individual object, right? I'm just pretty much selecting one edge vertically and expanding the selection, and then selecting one edge horizontally and expanding the selection and just clicking straight on each one. And for some of these other islands that are more twisted up, I might do a bit of peel mapping and stuff like that. But in general, just making the selections and straightening stuff gets the job done for most of these things. And it's really fast. It's just that there's a lot of these things. So yeah, you just pick an object from the big pile of objects and straighten out and move it to the dune pile. And I think this took me maybe three or 4 hours to do all of these. So it does take a while, but once it's done, it's done. And once it's done, I'll finally be able to get to something a little bit more fun, which is texturing. So this is really almost the last very technical part of doing this model. There is going to be a little bit of rigging, which I'll be showing after I've done all of the U mapping. Typically, I will do rigging after I've done all of my bakes UVs, and I've checked that everything looks nice, just because you kind of want your model to be completely finished when you're done rigging by the time you approach rigging, when you're in a studio, the pipeline is slightly different. Often, you will provide, like, a proxy mesh or, like, a half done mesh for the rigging to be started on, and that will be rigged, and then all of the rigging from that will be transferred onto your final rig. And so, you know, the riggers and the animators can get to work while you're still working on the character because there's still, you know, a fair amount of work to go until the character is finished. And, you know, if everyone's just waiting on standby for you to finish character, it's a little bit inefficient. But when you're working on your own portfolio piece, I will typically do rigging after I've done all of my UV mapping, but I'll do it before I texture because I like to have my model posed and in Mamas toolbg and I like to have the lighting not completely figured out, but, you know, a pretty simple three point lighting setup done. And, you know, I like to have everything pretty close to the final shot so that when I'm texturing, I can preview my textures and see how they would look when they're done. And having the model in an A pose or a tipos when I'm checking the textures, sometimes it makes things look a little bit more stiff and not as good as they will look in the final posed shot. So I like to have my characters kind of posed before I, you know, while I'm texturing. Because when you're texturing, what you need to do is go back and forth between substance painter and wherever you're rendering it. In my case, in this case, it's going to be M Z Tolbag, but you need to go back and forth between the two different softwares to check because the way substance and painter renders, renders things is never going to be the exact same as the way MbZ Tolbag renders things, or, for that matter, unreal engine or if you're using unity, then Unity also renders things slightly differently. So you always need to check how your textures look in the final rendering software while you're doing the texturing. And I feel like having the model posed when I'm checking the textures. That's the way I prefer to have it because it always makes the character look a little bit better because just having the character in an apos it looks a little bit stiff and for me, at least, it's sort of slightly demotivates me because it makes the model look a little bit less dynamic and as good as it will look in the final shot. So yeah, that's why I like to do rigging before texturing. And also, you kind of want to have your model completely finalized before you do your texturing. And sometimes you can have some issues where maybe a character's really maybe haven't quite got the topology ready for rigging. So it's better to, you know, all of the issues with the topology figured out before you approach texturing, and that's why I like to rig before I do texturing. Because that way, you know, once the rig is done, there's basically nothing that can go wrong with the topper. There's no reason to touch the topology anymore. So yeah, that's explained. Just pinning the vertices on this island here, getting them as close as I can to some of these grid lines so that can, as usual, go through and select all of the horizontal edges, use a horizontal line, and then do the same for the vertical ones. And you want to make sure that when you're selecting stuff and straightening stuff out like this, that you have it in the mode where it strains out each individual edge that's selected and not all of them together. And the way you can tell is when they're in this mode, you have a plus either side of the line on the icon of the tool. And when it's in the mode that just squashes everything down into one line, both of the pluses are on the same side of the line. So that's how you can tell which option the tool is working in. So that's this island almost done. Just need to align horizontally, and that's one done. Now, next for these belt buckles, I'm not going to be straightening them out or anything. I'll just rotate them to be aligned to the grid so they're not diagonal or something. This part, I will flatten out into a rectangle, using the pintles to roughly get it into shape. And then as usual, the horizontal align and the vertical align. Um, for the next chapter, I'm probably not going to manage to squeeze all of the UV Island straightening out into one chapter. So, you know, I'm going to do as much commentary as I can in this chapter, even though I don't think there's too much more for me to elaborate on here. I mean, these tools are pretty straightforward, and this is something I've already done in the previous chapters with the body. So there's not too much new content going on here, but I do want to have as much commentary as possible. So I will try and talk about everything I see on screen here. But for the next chapter, there is going to be a little bit of a time lapse as I finish up straightening out all of these UV islands just because, you know, it takes a while. I do want you to have all of the footage, though. So you can see, you know, if you're curious, you can watch me finish up all of these UV islands, but it's basically the same stuff you're seeing going on here right now, doing the same thing for this island as I did for the last one, just horizontal and vertical line. For islands that have, like, maybe that you aren't really as rectangular in the three D view as you make them in the two D view, I think it's a little bit better to not straighten out all of the internal lines because if you only pin the external borders, then everything on the inside sort of gets interpolated in penal mode, and you get a nice, not so distorted internal flow of all of the UVs. So for like belts that are really rectangular in the three D view, I will go in and clean up the internal edges and make sure they're straight a lot of the time if I feel like it. But for something that was maybe more curved and where I've straightened it out more than it is in the three D view, for those, I'll typically leave the internal lines as they are, and just let the peel tool sort of figure out and have them a little bit wavy on the inside because that will, you know, be a little bit less distorted in the three D view. As long as I've only pinned the exterior edges, that's my reasoning behind something like that. So I'm only going to be pinning the external edges for this one, and I'm going to move right onto this little belt here. And just pin the corners into place first. And once the corners are pinned into, you know, they're aligned both vertically and horizontally, I can go ahead and start pinning all of the other sides to each other. And once everything's roughly in shape, then I can go ahead and start doing horizontal alignment and then the vertical alignment. The order doesn't actually matter which you do it in, right? You can do the sides first and then do it horizontally later. It doesn't matter. Just make everything more or less a rectangle, and then you're good to go when it comes to Vs and make sure that everything is, you know, not too warped and distorted. Keep an eye on things in the three e. I think I already mentioned that before. So just go to use Peel mode here, line up all of the corners to the grid. Make sure that and then I can immediately straighten them out, do the same on the other side and on the top, select things, and straighten them out, select them, and straighten them out, and do that once more. And this island is good to go. Moving on to this one. Is re really tiny, so you know, this isn't going to make a huge impact on the overall UD map, but, you know, it helps to sort of be diligent and sort all of these things. It's definitely something that's desirable in a portfolio piece if you can show that, you know, that, you know, it's good practice to straighten UV islands out. Especially when it comes to things like hands, which I am going to be covering as well. Something that is really hated is, you know, some people call them starfish hands when all the things are spread out, all of the fingers are spread out in different directions. You want to straighten out hands the same way. I'm straightening out all of these islands. But I'll definitely be covering that a little bit later when I get to the gloves and the hands. Right now, I guess I should just stick to what's going on on screen here. A lot of these islands are really similar, so you're just seeing the same thing over and over again. Definitely feel free to skip ahead if this is getting boring. I am going to try and keep delivering commentary on all of this. But yeah, if you get the idea of what's going on here, just skip ahead until you see something new going on. It's definitely, I think, pretty clear what I'm doing here right now. With all of these pins and stuff, more or less making sure things are straight, so I can texture this easily and pack it easily. And, you know, it is a couple hours of work, so it just takes a while to do all of these things. And now I'm just using the loop selection tools, growing out my edge selections so I can align everything horizontally, doing the same vertically. And, you know, you want to make sure you aren't selecting excess edges that you don't mean to straighten out when you're doing this, of course, because sometimes the selection expansion tools, you know, depending on how you have your edge loops set up, they'll crossover into a different direction and maybe select something that you didn't intend to have included in your selection. So definitely make sure you aren't doing stuff like that. Moving on to this little belt. Again, you're seeing the same thing. I've done a bunch of times before selecting the sides and straightening them out. And make sure that around the ends of islands like this as well, once you've done all of the alignment with the alignment tours, that the edges are still spaced evenly in the vertical or horizontal direction so that nothing's squashed up like it was when you saw there before. So I'm just moving off a bunch of stuff to the side that I'm going to work on in a minute here, just so I don't have to zoom out and re select everything all over again. This island, I am going to straighten out a little bit, these side edges. And this little island also going to straighten it out, using the alignment tools and I'm going to use peel mode for something very basic like this. And yeah, that's all there is to something small like this. This one, you know, it does get narrower towards the end in three D space, but it's not so significant that I can't straighten it out in the two D view or in the UVs. So that's what I'm going to do. First I'll straighten out the bottom edge. And then I'll do the same for the sides. And the top edge, I'm not sure why I said bottom and top inverted here, but I think you get the idea of what I meant. And yeah, even though it is sort of it gets narrower towards the end ind view, I've decided to straighten it out anyway just because it's going to be easier to texture and pack if I just straighten all of these things out. It's just a little bit more efficient. You know, sometimes I mean, you don't have to straight things like that one out that I just did there with the bottom of that strap. Um you can leave those as the shape that they are. Especially if you're planning to paint something onto there in the two D view, like some sort of logo, it might be a better idea to leave it in the shape that it is in the three D view in that case, because if you've straighten it out into a rectangle and then you try and apply some stamp or little icon to it in the two D view, it's going to come out skewed. But in that case, you can still apply it easily in the three D view without issue. So there are ways around eva option that you pick. So I'm slowly working my way through all of the remaining islands still sticking to the ones that are really just rectangles pretty much. So this is really straightforward and easy, right? When it's stuff like belts and all of these straps and rectangular things, you know, there's no questions when it comes to stranding them out. Most of the time, unless they're like, twisting in on themselves or doing something weird, in which case, you know, I might have to think about it a little bit. But in general, you know, I think you can see that these are really straightforward and simple to figure out. And, um, yeah. I mean, just a little bit more of this to go. Uh, you know, I'll be done with these soon, and then I'll have to move on to the stuff that is a little bit more maybe complex or just, you know, there's a few more options when it comes to unwrapping stuff that isn't as rectangular and linear as this. And those are going to be a little bit more simple to what I did with the rest of the body, right? So, the whole hood and all of those parts, I'll get to in a while. Just a few more of these belts to go, I guess. When a belt has sort of rounded end like this, then, you know, there's not too much you can straighten out there. So I'll just pretty much straighten out the sides, and then I'll I'll try to have the end, you know, not not extend outwards too much, but, you know, you still do need to keep it round, because if you try and turn, like, a rounded end into a rectangle, that's probably not going to end well. It's probably going to look pretty bad in the three D view. So yeah, no reason to try and straighten out rounded ends. But the sides, even if they're a little bit rounded, you can straighten out, like, the sides or stuff that just isn't that round. It's just when there's a tighter curve, you know, definitely don't try and make that completely straight. You know, flatten out the bits that seem reasonably easy to flatten out, but don't know, put harsh corners somewhere where there aren't any. So if something has rounded corners, then you want to keep those. Don't try and stretch them out and turn them into a rectangle because that will introduce more distortion and it's really introducing distortion and, uh defamation for no reason or warping or, you know, whatever you want to call bad UVs, basically, or, you know, EVs that look bad in the three. So I'm just going to be straightening out the sides for this one. And, you know, the very tops of the ends, but I'm keeping the rounded corners for this island right here. And then, you know, sometimes I'll go in and move around the corners a little bit just to keep them more even. But if they look even enough and not too wonky as they are, then I'll just leave them the way they are. So moving on to this little strap here. It's also fairly bent and twisted. So I'm going to have to spend a little bit of time straightening it out with the peeltol if when you're straightening out an object with the peeltol and some parts are like, really ballooning outwards a lot. It's typically a symptom of something being squashed down too much. Stretched out too much. So you may want to move that vertice closer or further away from some of the surrounding edges instead of just trying to pin every single vertex in the area that is ballooning outwards, downwards. It's probably an issue of something higher up the chain being, you know, pushed way out of proportion, and that's throwing off everything down below it. So yeah, sort of check things that are a little bit higher up the chain of vertices to see if maybe you've pinned something and moved it in the wrong direction or just, you know, moved it way out of where it's supposed to be compared to everything else if you have an issue, you know, a part of the object that you're peeling really ballooning outwards to a disproportionate extent. So just making another selection of items I'm going to work on here. Just going to straighten out the ends of this little square, and that one's done, and I can just rotate this buckle piece to align it to the grid. Nothing to do there. And now for this one, I'm going to straighten it out just like everything else. And I tried to use the rectangularized button there, but, you know, I didn't really trust it to put all of the edges at a consistent distance apart from each other. I don't really trust that tool, so, you know, you can try using it, but I think you'll very quickly see why I don't like it too much, and I just prefer to straighten stuff out with the align tools instead. Pretty sure I mentioned that already, though, so I am repeating myself a little bit. So I'm almost done with all of the objects that are kind of rectangular in shape, so I can start to move on to some of these bigger things that are a little bit more irregular. What you can do is you can highlight all of the stuff you've finished just check how much work you've got left if you're worried about that. And you'll see that all of the unhighlighted areas are still stuff you've got to do. In my case, it's still quite a lot left, but some of the more tedious things have been taken care of already. Working on this little island and trying to make it as straight as possible. It's like I've said before, a good idea to find where whatever UV island you're working on is in a three G view and keep an eye on it to make sure that you're not really deforming it. Especially in some cases where you might think, you know what shape that UV Island is meant to be in the three. But, you know, you might be mistaken and forcing something into a completely different shape as to what it's meant to be. So it's a good idea to check when it comes to these things. And again, even though this object isn't too rectangular in the three E view, I am going to sort of try and rectangularize it in the UV map. But I'm also making sure to keep these edges more or less straight in the three D view. I don't want stuff to get too wonky here. So that should be good for this one. Next up, the back of one of the pads on the belts. For this one, I'll just be straightening up the sides because it's the back of an island. It's not something I'm too concerned about. I just going to quickly select the vertices of the sides and straight them out. Like so. And this one's done so I can move it up to the top and here's another chunk of some belt or something like that. Again, just pinning the vertices and aligning them to the grid. And once the object is in roughly the correct shape, it'll be time to select the sides and align vertically and do the same on the opposite side. So a fairly monotonous process. Probably a good idea to have some music or something going on in the background while you work on these and just chill out as you work your way through all of these Vs because otherwise, it can get really boring. So this sort of curve UV is a prime example of stuff you definitely want to straighten out, because if you tried to apply a tiling texture to that, who would come out all, you know, wonky, it would start to be, you know, going off of the edge of the UV. It would just look bad, basically what I'm trying to say. You want to imagine how these things would be assembled and sewn together in real life, what kind of fabric piece they would cut from, because that's how the patterns would be lined up in real life, and that's how you're actually going to be lining them up in substance painted, too. It's not all that different. So, you know, stuff that's curved into a C shape like this one was before, you got to straighten these out. Otherwise, texturing them will be a real nightmare. So make sure you do them. Um, when I'm straightening out this little strap, I want to make sure that the little triangle on the end there doesn't end up getting squashed down like it just did. So I need to make sure to move that little vertex down. So, you know, you don't want to have squashed faces like that because they'll look pretty bad on your beaks. Although when it's a piece that's that small, it probably won't be noticeable, or it's probably facing a in such a direction where it's not visible or something like that. But still, you don't want to have stuff like that leftover because it'll look bad. You don't want to have overlapping faces, right? So just straightening out this pad, and that is done. And now I'm moving on to some of the bigger and slightly more complex parts. So this is the backside of the shoulder pocket. And well, this one is still fairly rectangular in shape, so it's going to be the same deal for this one. Just put all the corners in the right spots and straighten them out. Now, I'm getting pretty close to the end of this chapter. And yeah, I know some of this has probably gotten pretty boring, but I will advise you to make sure you watch the start of the next chapter because I will be having some commentary there on how to straighten out gloves and hands. It might not be at the very start of the video, but somewhere towards the first half of the video, I will definitely be having at least some commentary explaining and detailing how I'm straightening out the fingers on the gloves. That's a pretty important thing to do, because if you leave your hands as a sort of starfish shape, like I mentioned earlier, it's seen as a pretty amateurish thing to and everyone likes it when you have your fingers really nicely straightened out. It makes texturing them much easier, and it makes fitting them in also much easier. And, you know, like I said, it's sort of a mark of an amateur if you've left your hands in a sort of starfish shape. So make sure you take a look at that part in the next chapter. It's definitely going to be there. I was hoping to fit it into this chapter, but the time just hasn't allowed for that because I don't want to speed this footage up too much, so, you know, it's not useful because you can't tell what's going on anymore when it's too fast. So yeah, I wanted to fit in the commentary on the gloves into this chapter, but I couldn't please make sure you take a look at that part in the next chapter. Even if some of this stuff has gotten really repetitive and boring, you really want to check it out in the next one. It's actually somewhat similar to what I'm doing to the sole of boots here, because these kind of like toe shoes, so they kind of have fingers of their own. But, of course, when the fingers are a lot longer than this, it's a little bit trickier. But this is a somewhat similar process, right? And this is a somewhat similar result to what you're going to want to have for the hands. So you can sort of think of this as a little preview of what I'll be detailing when I'm talking about the hands. You want the fingers to be straightened out like this, so they're not all just splayed out in different directions. You want them facing the same direction, more or less. It makes things a little bit easier later down the line, and it looks a lot better in the UV map. And it saves space, all of that. It's just much better to have things handled this way when it comes to hands. Of course, this is a little bit different from a hand. It's not quite what a hand looks like. So but, yeah, it's something you want to make sure you do properly. So I'll say again, check it out in the next chapter. I know I said earlier that I was going to have the next chapter as a time laps. It probably will still be a significant amount of time lapse in the next chapter, just with no commentary, but I will be making sure to detail how to do the gloves in the next one. So yeah, I'll stop repeating myself now. And yeah, so with what 55. 15 Straightning Hand And Remaining Uv's: I Hello. This is Chapter 15 of Eve Mapping and baking. So this chapter is largely going to be time lapses, because a lot of this stuff you've already seen me do in the last chapter and the chapters before it. It's all very straightforward, but I want you to stay tuned for the part where I talk about how to unwrap hands and gloves because that's pretty new and it's pretty important to get that sort of thing right. So that's coming up in about 2 minutes. And up until then, there's a little bit of footage in the way. So I'll just provide some commentary on this as well. So I'm straightening out the inside of the neck piece right now, and I want at least one of the edges of this to be straight so that I can line it up with maybe one of the sides of the UV sheet or at least with some of the other rectangular UV islands I have here as well. So I want to make sure at least the bottom side of this UV island is straightened out. So, you know, it's at least easy to pack around in that direction, and, you know, the top half is going to have to stay a little bit, you know, curved like that just because that's the shape of the actual object in three D. So, you know, I can't straighten out the top half, but I can definitely straighten up one edge, which is going to make it a lot easier to pack around and organize. So that's what I'm doing right here. And I'm straightening out the inside as well, because another benefit of straightening stuff out is it aligns to the pixel grid of a texture, and you get less aliasing around edges and stuff. So remember that also helps as well. End caps, like this is probably the end cap of the boot or the glove, you don't have to worry about those. You can just keep them as they are, and they'll be scaled down and shoved into all of the gaps in the UV sheet, towards the end of packing the UVs. So they're not something you really have to pay attention to. Now, here's the top of the glove. Gloves are a little bit easier to unwrap than actual ungloved hands because, of course, gloves have a few more panel lines that you can split along compared to just an ungloved hand. If you're unwrapping an ungloved hand, the way it will typically be handled is you'll have one UV island for the bottom of the hand. So, um, if you look at the palm of your hand, everything you see would be one UV island and then another UV island for the top of the hand. And, you know, when you can only split up the object into two parts, it's a little bit tricky to get all of the fingers to be straight and not have everything to warped. When it comes to gloves, these gloves have a few more panel lines than that that I could split them along. So I don't need to have the thumb included in this UV island, which makes things a little bit easier. But it's still something you have to do properly. So right now I'm just straightening out the wrist to make sure it's straight, and now I'm moving on to the fingers a little bit. I want to make sure that all the things are pointing straight in the same direction and that they're all sort of evenly shaped and spaced. So they're not just a random, splayed out, you know, shaped like they are before I touch this UV map. I want it to be all more or less rectangularized and even and straight. So it's best to work very gradually, and you're going to probably need to put in quite a few pins when you're doing this, because when you're moving stuff around a lot with the peel tools, especially the way you need to do it for the gloves, you'll have a lot of parts ballooning outwards and sort of becoming way too big. And so you need a lot of pins to sort of contain it and stop it from doing that. And have things placed where you want them. So do your initial pass just gradually working through one finger to the next. And once you've got that done, make sure you haven't pinned the wrist in to be too small of a scale. And something like this is, you know, pretty close to what I need. It's just I need to straighten out all of the remaining parts. Now you can see the fingers are really kind of squashed up and wonky here. But this is roughly the shape that you want for the UVs of hand. You need to, you know, make sure that all of these parts are straight now. So the sides, I am definitely going to want to straighten out like this. And make sure that the fingertips aren't off center and warped to the side, too. I kind of want them to be straight as well. You know, it's a little bit of back and forth. And sometimes it's much harder to do than other times, it really depends on how you set up your topology. In this case, this wasn't too tricky, especially because the panel lines of the glove let me split off the thumb. If you need to include the thumbs, then it's a little bit trickier to do this. But, you know, as long as you know the shape that you need to put the hand into, then, you know, just putting enough pins in will eventually get you there. So it's best to just work on one finger at a time and move along the fingers in order gradually. That's the way you'll avoid having to, you know, select a bunch of pins and move them all over once once because if you do the first finger and then the last finger completely, and then you realize that they're spread apart too much, a bit like what I've done here, then you might end up having to unpin a bunch of stuff or move a bunch of pins over, and that's a hassle. So Uh, the way I've found that is easiest to work on these things is to do the first ther, then a second one and work in order like that. Don't do, the first and the last one out of order. And keep track of which finger you're working on and how long they are in the three D model. So, you know, right now I'm working on the pinky finger. So I want to make sure that it's shorter than the finger that's going to come next, and then that finger is going to be shorter than the ring finger, and the index finger and the ring finger are roughly the same length. So yeah, make sure that when you're pinning stuff like this, it all makes sense in the three D as well. Don't accidentally make the pinky longer than all the other fingers because, you know, it's not meant to be like that. Is try and make the width roughly consistent as well. And yeah, this is actually working out quite well. It helps to straighten out the sides. That really puts as many, you know, stops the fingers from moving around too much as you're editing things. So just roughly get the sides of the fingers straight, and then you can do a vertical align and have everything pretty much done for you at that point. It's just a matter of getting the fingers straight enough to where you can apply that vertical alignment. So I'm pretty much done with this finger, and I can move on to the next one now. You want to make sure that the very corner of the finger, all of the vertices there are evenly spaced. And yeah, whenever something's ballooning out like that, it's probably a good idea to unpin things around it, and then start slowly bringing all of the vertices in where you want them. Gradually, just pretty much working in order. You can see that I'm doing the left side first. And once everything on the left side is in the right place, then I can move on to doing the same for the right side. It's a little bit of trial and error, but also just, I mean, as long as you know where you're headed with this, like the target of the shape of how you want these fingers to look when they're done, I feel like this is fairly straightforward. But yeah, I did want to make sure that I let you guys know that it's generally good practice to do this to your hand UVs, because like I've mentioned before, it's really, like, sort of amateurish to have your fingers splayed out like the default quick peel will do. I think that's something that any sort of industry person looking at your U Vs would immediately notice that, you know, you've kind of, you know, shown that maybe you don't exactly know what you're doing when it comes to hands and stuff like that. This is pretty much how everyone in the industry will unwrap hands when you're working on, like, an actual production. Uh, of course, for portfolio stuff, if you're not going to be showing off your UVs, sometimes it's, you know, okay to be a little bit lazy with these things, but this is the good standard accepted practice of how you want to approach hands and fingers and stuff. You want to straight them all out, line them up like this, and yeah, have them like this. So this thing is also almost done. You can see that when I go into the area distortion view, there is a little bit of area distortion, right? Some of the fingers are quite blue. That means they're too big and some of them a little bit more red. But as long as it's not like super severe, it's okay because, you know, I am sort of stretching this hand around a little bit to get it to fit this UV shape. But, you know, it's okay in this case, because I'm doing it in order to have, you know, something that will pack well and something that's going to be easy to texture as well. So, you know, especially on organic objects like hands and shapes like this, it's okay to have a little bit of area distortion. It's definitely not an issue. So don't be worried about that because there's no way to fit this hand UV into this sort of shape without having a little bit of area distortion. What's more important to look at than just the area distortion view, which, you know, it doesn't really take into account which direction the polygons are distorted in and, you know, what's going on there. It just all it does is it calculates, you know, the average area of all the polygons in the three DU and compares it to what you have on screen. So it's not exactly accurate. What's more important to check when you're doing this stuff is look at the three D view and look at the texture checker grid and all of the letters and numbers. And if they're severely distorted to where, you know, it's hard to see what's going on there or if it looks really bad, then you know that that's something you have to adjust and fix a little bit. Otherwise, you know, it's fine. So what I'm looking at here is most of the fingers look pretty okay, apart from the index finger, which is the one I'm working on now before it was a little bit too big because I made it the biggest finger, even though the index finger is usually a little bit shorter than the ring finger. So I'm going through and sort of adjusting things downwards a little bit to get it to be a little bit less distorted than it was before. And again, you want to make sure that the little corners of in between the fingers aren't collapsing in on themselves. And yeah, this is all there is to unwrapping hands. There's not too much more I can say about this, right? So just make sure that this is how you line up your fingers when you unwrap your hands. This is how all the industry professionals like to see hands unwrapped. It's the generally accepted way to do it. No one likes starfish hands. That's what a lot of people call them when you have your fingers splayed out like a starfish. So I would highly advise not to leave them like that because everyone will know that you're a nube and you don't know what you're doing. So yeah, try and do this if you can. And that's going to be all for the commentary I'll be doing for this chapter, because the rest of the stuff I'm going to be doing here is, you know, pretty tedious. And the same stuff you saw me do in the last chapter, just going through all of the UV islands and just straightening them up with the exact tools I'm using here. There's nothing really more special or different going on. So yeah, that'll be all for now. And please enjoy the time lapse. That's going to be coming up from here on, and thanks for watching so far. Mm. That I like that So I'm coming up to the end of this chapter. I'm just going to finish up straightening out the rest of these fingers, and that's going to be all I'll be including in this chapter. There's a few more islands that I have to straighten out, and I'm going to leave that for the next chapter, as well as adding in a few meshes that are still missing from the UV map of the accessories. There's a few buckles that are leftover and haven't been included in this whole UV map yet. So there's going to be one more chapter of just me going through and straightening a few more UVs. And from there on, I'll be packing all of the UVs together and finally baking. Baking is also going to be a little bit drawn out and tedious because there's a lot of prep work you have to do to bake objects like this, which have a lot of parts that might intersect when they're baking and stuff like that. So there's going to be a fair bit of commentary and stuff when it comes to that. Ah, so thanks for watching this chapter, and I'll see you in the next one. 56. 16 Finishing Straightning Uv's: This is Chapter 16 of UV mapping. So in this chapter, I'm just finishing up, straightening out the last remaining UV islands. It's the same exact thing I've been doing for the last two chapters. So this is just going to be a time lapse chapter. I won't be providing any additional commentary because it's all the kind of stuff that I've already covered in the previous couple chapters. I won't be introducing anything new. I'm just going through and finishing up the last of these UV islands that need to be straightened out. So please go ahead and enjoy the time laps, and that'll be all for me for now. I Uh a a Okay. D. D. D. D. D. The ir. H So we're coming up to the end of this chapter. I've gone through and straightened out pretty much all of the UVs here. So there's nothing to do in terms of straightening UVs. In the next chapter, I will be going through packing all of these islands together. And once all of the islands are packed, I'll be able to move on to baking. So there is going to be commentary in the next chapter. So yeah, stay tuned for that one. And that's all for this one. Thanks for watching. 57. 17 Packing Accesory Uv's: Hi. This is Chapter 17 UV mapping. In this chapter, I'm going to be packing together all of the UVs that I was straightening out in the last three chapters. What I'm doing now is I'm attaching all of the different parts that I worked on together into one object because before I just applied the Unwrap UVW modifier to all of these separate objects at once to do the UVs and now I'm actually attaching them together. You don't actually need to do this. I'm just doing this so I can show off a little tool there is in the Unwrap UVW modifier. Don't actually end up using this tool, but I wanted to show it off anyways just in case. So, when I'm packing my UVs, I actually like to group stuff up by sort of the object they belong to. So, for example, all of the UV islands from the gloves, I would prefer to have them in one place on the UV map, just to make it easy to find whichever island I'm looking for or something like that. And then the same goes for something like the belt and something like the little pads that go behind the belts. So right now, what I'm using is just the pack button to pack these into the corner of the UV square. And I'm just using this to make my selections and, you know, have these nice little groups that I can easily select. So this is sort of how I would organize and group up a UV map. I would just go by object, and I would try to have all of the different islands that make up these objects in roughly a similar place or close to each other. And this makes it a little bit easier to paint your UVs, paint your textures, and to sort of troubleshoot some issues because all of these things are sort of together in one space, so it's easy to find the specific island you're looking for or something like that. So, you know, if I can, this is how I try to organize my UVs when I'm packing stuff. So once I've got all of these objects sort of grouped up, so it is going to be the last group, all of these tiny little buckles and stuff, and I'll just pack it all together. Now, there is a sort of group UVs function that lets you group up all of the selected UV islands that you have selected and sort of put them in a group. And the UV packing tool should sort of take that into account. And treat them as a single object when you're packing. But if I do this, and then I click on the packing button, you'll see that it didn't actually work. It didn't take those groups into account at all. And this actually really frustrated me a little bit when I was working on a previous project, and it took me a while to figure out. But this is actually a result of three DSMx 2022, adding a new packing algorithm that doesn't take groups into account at all. So if I head into this little drop down menu, you can see that I can choose a different packing tool and I want to choose non convex, there's a few different options here you can see, you can use which ones work best. But if I use non convex packing instead of the unfold three D packing, you can see that it has actually taken the different groups into account. Now, while it has done this, I don't think that this is a great pack because the way this tool works is it just treats all of the groups you have as a single object and it's not smart enough to actually move around the internal islands that make up those groups a little bit in order to get the groups to fit together better. So I don't actually like using this tool for situations like this where I have more irregularly shaped islands. This works best when you have a bunch of things that are almost the same shape, like a bunch of tiny little rectangles or something like that. It doesn't work great in this situation. So in this case, I'm just going to be doing all of my packing pretty much manually, and this isn't actually something you have to do. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to UVs, so I probably spend a little bit more time on them than I should. You know, I probably overdo this stuff a little bit. While it is nice to have UV sort of grouped up by object, so you can easily find stuff that you need. And, you know, it makes texturing go a tiny bit more smoothly and stuff like that. It's not something that is essential. You can still texture perfectly fine without anything being organized. And I don't think it's exactly expected as, you know, standard practice in industry. I feel like it's a nice thing to have and to do. It's like it's how I like to have my UV setup. But I'm not going to go out and say that it's something you need to do. You know, it's not something that's essential. It's not make or break. I wouldn't even say that it's important. It's something you can do if you want to. Like I said, I'm a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things. So I spend probably a little bit more time than I should just manually packing UVs like this. The auto pack I showed you at the start is probably, you know, more than fine when it comes to this set of UVs. It did a fairly good job. And auto packing in general, does a pretty good job of packing together small objects like this. The only time it struggles is with large irregular shaped objects like the ones that I had with the body vs. These are nice and small, for the most part, aside from a few bigger ones, so it does a really good job of packing them together. Of course, it won't organize them properly, but like I said, that's not something that's essential. It's kind of optional what I'm doing on screen here right now. So if you don't feel like it, you can feel free to sort of skip ahead and just do an autopack or, you know, do like maybe an autopack and move some things around that maybe you don't like to slightly improve it if you feel like. But, yeah, you don't have to do exactly what I'm doing on screen here, which is sort of very meticulously manually packing together all of the islands and trying to group them together by, you know, what they are and how they relate to the islands around them. By manually packing this stuff, I do manage to squeeze out maybe a few percent more in terms of texture scale, right? The way I like to work is I think I've detailed this before in the chapter of the body. But I'll try and pack stuff into a smaller grid. One way I do it is I scale everything up, and then I try and pack it into the same UV square. Or what I'm doing right now is I'm using the grid from the texture checker, and I'm just trying to pack two squares away from the border of the actual texture checker. I'm trying to fit all of the UV islands I'm packing in here, two squares away from the border on the top and the right side. And, you know, that's to try and squeeze out a little bit more textile density out of this texture map. And when I'm picking UVs to pack, I'm, you know, keeping track of the sort of little packed together piles of UVs that I'm pulling the UVs from. So I'm still sort of keeping track of things and making sure to take all of the different parts of the boots from the boot pile of UV lands and all the parts of the glove from the glove pile of UV Ions. So everything is still sort of clumped together based on the objects they belong to. And yeah, this results in a very nice neat and pretty efficient UV map. But like I said, it's not significantly better than the automatic solution. So if you don't feel like going through this whole process, this whole hassle, you can, you know, just go with an automatic solution, and you'll be fine. You know, you won't lose any points over doing something like that. So it's up to you if you feel like doing this or not. Um, for some reason, I do feel like doing this. I'm not sure if I enjoy it, but it's something I tend to do on my personal projects, especially when I'm not under a very strict time limit. When I don't have a looming deadline, then I just tend to go down this rabbit hole of packing my UVs. I'm not sure why. I guess I do enjoy it. So yeah, That's what this chapter is going to be, me trying to fit all of these UV islands into a slightly smaller square than they got packed into by default. And once I do get it packed in, get them all packed together, I will scale it up to take up the full space of this texture square. So for now, I'm just trying to be really quick and get everything into the square as quickly as possible. I'm scaling down some of these things that are barely visible. So the backsides of the pouches and the inside of the boot, I can actually scale down because I don't need them to be full resolution, since they're barely going to be visible, right? The backside of the pouch lid isn't very visible. Can't scale it down to zero because it still needs to have some color information, and it is slightly visible from some angles, but it doesn't need to be full resolution. It can be like, you know, 30% lower in terms of resolution. These things are sort of a rule of thumb, right? There's no precise rule to how much smaller you can make those parts, but, you know, I just kind of eyeball it to what makes sense. No one's going to mediculously check how much downscale a part. Uh, sometimes even if it's a very visible part, if I just need to scale it down by 1% to get it to fit in between two other UV islands, sometimes I'll do that. So, you can bend the rules a little bit sometimes. Um, but don't get too comfortable with doing that. Everything still needs to roughly be the same textile density. So in terms of, like, major objects that are very visible, like I said, the back sides of things that aren't very visible and the caps that, you know, cap off, like, the top of the shoes or the top of the gloves, those, those can be a much lower resolution, but everything else needs to be more or less consistent textile density. And that actually extends across different texture sets. You generally want your whole character to be of the same textile density. The face is usually a significantly higher textil density, though, just because there's so much extra detail on the face, and you basically want the face to look really good because if it's even slightly blurry, that's very noticeable compared to, like, the clothes being slightly blurry, no one really minds that kind of stuff. But if your face is slightly just even barely blurry, you know, that bothers people a lot more. So uh, that's one thing to look out for. So I'm just sort of moving things around to see if I can make more space for the rest of the objects that don't fit in here. Now, of course, it's fairly obvious that I'm not going to be able to fit everything in at this scale. So at some point, I'm going to have to scale some of these things down. Remember that you can use the holes within UV Islands to pack other islands in. For this one, I just scaled down the backside of this pocket because the backside is not really visible at all. So I scaled it down and put it into the hole in the front of that UV island. Slightly move the sides out a little bit, giving me a little bit more space to work with. So I'm moving them outwards to where there's just one UV grid checker square between my UVs and the outer border of this UV square. So, you know, I'm basically not making that much extra textil density by doing this manual pack. And I think you can see why I said that this is optional and not entirely necessary, right? I'm putting in quite a lot of work for a very minor benefit. So like I said, this is optional. It's not something you need to do. You UVs will probably be fine if you largely automate this. There's also other softwares for packing UVs. When it comes to characters, you definitely can't do everything with auto packing, especially when it comes to the body, the face, of course, although with the face, there's not all that much packing overall. But yeah, with larger body parts, auto packers generally don't do a great job. With smaller stuff like this, they do do a better job. There's different solutions out there. Rizo UV, overall, it's like a UV mapping package. It's like a software specifically for UV mapping, and it's fairly good. I used to use it until my license ran out. It's got a bunch of really useful features, especially if you're working with large amounts of similar objects. It has functions to sort of group together identical UVs and uh, pack them together. That's something I can recommend, but I don't use it these days just because I haven't bothered to renew a license for it. The default packing tools, I mean, in three Max, they're fairly basic, but there's not anything all that special when it comes to packing stuff. For environments, maybe it's a bigger deal where they have to deal with hundreds or thousands of objects. For a single character, you know, there's only so much packing you have to do so there's not all that much to it, really. So I'm just figuring out how to fit in all these remaining parts into, you know, the few spaces that I've got left. This looks like I can get it to fit at the scale it is now. So yeah, I will be able to say that I did a better job of packing than the computer, even if it is just barely better. But, um, yeah, I'm still winning. So I'm just shuffling stuff around, you know, it's basically just a little puzzle of figuring out where I can put what. I guess a few rules I can mention to keep in mind when you're doing this is, of course, make sure that you are leaving some padding space around every single UV island. Um, it can be tricky to keep track of this when you're dealing with so many islands, just take a good look and make sure there's enough space around every single island. I'm not sure of any native tool for checking padding in three DSMx. What you could do is render out a wire frame and then maybe bring that into Photoshop and check some of the gap distances or something like that. But it's not something I do. I just eyeball things, and I've never really had an issue with padding becoming a problem. So, you know, it's not something that bothers me too much. The other thing you want to make sure is that you keep your islands more or less facing in the same direction for things that are going to be using the same material. So for example, these belts, if I were to apply some sort of tiling pattern to them, it would be nice if all of the belts were facing in the same direction for that pattern because then I could just apply the same material to all of them in substance painter instead of having to make a separate layer or a separate folder for each one and then, rotate all of the tiling textures that I'm using to match the angle of every single belt. So I would say don't mix and match the direction of parts if you can help it. Now, sometimes you can't really help it, and it's the only way to fit some things together is especially if you have some larger islands, sometimes the only way you're going to fit them into the rest of your UV is if you rotate something around, you know. But in this case, I can sort of fit everything in here without having to rotate anything. So I'm trying to keep as many things as possible facing the same direction as each other. So like, all of the glove parts are facing upwards. All of the belts are facing sideways and stuff like that. Basically, anything that's sharing a material is facing the same direction. So there's that. There's padding. What else is there? I'm really not sure. But there really isn't all that much to packing, like I said earlier. That's probably everything, I guess. So I'm almost done with packing in all of the larger islands here. So done once I'm done with those, I'll just have to pack in all of the little tiny ones, like the little ends of the buckles. I have, I guess, just one group of UVs leftover of all the really tiniest UV islands that I can really squeeze in between all of the bigger ones. So I guess what you could say is the approach to packing Vs is a bit like packing luggage, I guess, you put in the bigger items first, and then you can fit all of the little ones in around them. That's probably a good way to look at it, but, you know, there's only so much you can explain about how you fit a bunch of different things into one big square, right? It's not the most technical or difficult thing in the world, and I would say that I am overcomplicating it here. Like I said, at the start of the video, there is no reason why you can't just use an autopack really. Like, I'm barely more efficient than what was done by the autopacker. I guess I'm a little bit more organized than what the autopacker bit did, but, you know, it's I wouldn't say, this was worth the effort. In hindsight, I would maybe just have gone with the autopack but like I did say, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to UVs, and I'm just used to working this way. So, you know, what can I say? That is, This is how I do things, and I'm under no illusion that this is necessarily the best way to do them. You know, I will say that the result is very good for me. It's a very organized and efficiently packed out texture sheet. When I'm done with doing it manually, the only thing I would say is maybe it's not the most efficient use of time, especially if you're on somebody else's payroll, you may want to just do this automatically instead of spending a couple of hours doing it by hand. Um but the autopacols are really straightforward. There's not too many options you even have in there. I mean, you can choose to allow it to rotate things or not. I would suggest turning off rotation and manually rotating things in the direction you want because you want things, like I said earlier, to be rotated in a similar direction to each other, just so you can easily apply textures to them in substance painter when you're texturing, right? That is one of the more important aspects to packing these textures together is to make sure that everything is nice and easy to use when you're in substance painter, because yeah, if you don't have stuff aligned in the same direction, you're going to have to be making a lot more layers to account for that, so you can have every single texture rotated in the specific direction of every part. So it makes the process a little bit smoother in substance painter if you have things well organized here. Um, so yeah, keep that in mind when you're packing your UVs. Just a few more of these little islands to go. You do want to be careful when you're squeezing stuff in, like I mentioned before, make sure you're keeping your padding distances. In a few areas here, I may be cutting it kind of close, maybe making the padding distance a little bit too small. This doesn't have a huge impact on personal projects, really, because you're usually going to be rendering things up close under MIP mapping distance, right. MIP mapping only becomes apparent at slightly further distances. So you know, I've never had issues with padding all that much in personal projects. I think I said that earlier already. But yeah, make sure you aren't getting too close to other islands when you're trying to pack in those last few things if you're deciding to do this manually at all. Although I would say even if you're doing an automatic padding, you'll probably want to move some stuff around to make sure that, you know, just take a glance at it and see if maybe there are some things you would do better or differently than the auto pact did. You can sort of use it as a base and then adjust from there. So yeah, I just have to fit these last few things in, and they're very small, so it's kind of easy to find a little spot where they can fit among all of the other items. And once this is done, I can export this and head into Mamza, do a bake and see if any issues come up with my UE map. So you can look forward to that in the next chapter. But for now, I have about seven or 8 minutes worth of fitting these little items into the texture. So, you know, if you're getting bored of this content, this content of me just fitting stuff into little gaps, then feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter. I do know that this can get a little bit boring, so yeah. If you are going to stick around till the end of this chapter, I will try and come up with things to say here. So I'm just moving stuff around here in order to try and fit a few more islands in. I don't have too many left, and I also need to pay attention to the padding distances. I do need to leave a little bit of space between everything. It is still important. So yeah, this last set of UV islands is, I guess, getting, you know, put in random spots across the entire texture map. So, you know, it's not exactly following the rule of all of the other UV islands that I packed in here. But, you know, this is really the only way that I'm going to efficiently pack everything into those little gaps. So, you know, I don't mind doing this just for this last bit of, you know, all these little buckles and stuff. Just as long as most of the things are in the right spots. But, yeah, like I've said a couple of times already, this is entirely optional. You don't have to try and organize stuff by object or anything in your UV islands. I feel like it can be nice, especially if you're working with other people that aren't exactly familiar with your UVs or if you come back to a project after a long time, it can be tricky to, you know, texture stuff if you don't remember where anything is. But even in those cases, you know, it doesn't take that much longer to sort of figure out where stuff is meant to be. You know, you just check in substance painter wherever your cursor is in the two DV compared to the three D one and stuff like that. So yeah, it's not essential. I just I'm just used to packing UVs this way. What can I say? Um, so I'm just going to pack a few of the smaller items inside the holes between the buckles, making sure not to get too close to the sides of the buckles because I am concerned about that padding space. And yeah, it is a little bit of a struggle to fit these last few items in here. So I am going to scale down everything by 0.1, just using the value spinner on the bottom there. Just give myself a tiny bit of extra space. I'm not sure how much, or if at all, my UVs have ended up larger than the autopack ones, to be honest. So, you know, uh, maybe this wasn't the best use of time. But, you know, this is part of all the footage I recorded while working on the character, so I do have to provide some commentary on it. So just quickly putting in all these last few islands here that I have left and finding some spots for the end caps, because I also need to put them in somewhere. And yeah, it's not too tricky getting pretty close to done here. So, you know, this boring chapter is about to be over, and I can head into baking and sort of trying to figure out if there are any remaining issues with this mesh. Or with the CUVs and all that stuff. And then once I've baked, I can move on to rigging, which it's always kind of fun to see the character somewhat come to life when you rig it up with an armature, so you can move it around and pose it. I think that's always a really cool step. And that's where the character really starts taking shape after, you know, a long amount of time working on technical stuff that doesn't really have too much of a visual result. Uh, right, like retopo and UV mapping and baking basically gives you a result that looks exactly the same as how your high poly looked. So, you know, it's not exactly a very satisfying type of work because your end result is to make something that looks exactly like the high poly that you've already made. But once you actually rig that low poly up and it can move, that's like a sort of a big step forwards, and it's something cool to look at, at least in my opinion. So that's when things start getting fun once the model's rigged, and then you can move into texturing and, you know, add all the colors and stuff, and that's even more fun. So we're about to be out of all of the boring technical stuff very soon. After this material is baked out, it's just going to be one more, the mechanical arm. And I'm finally going to be able to show you guys some more of the fun stuff. So yeah, that's going to be all for this chapter. Thanks for stinging through and watching all of it. And hopefully the next one will be a little bit more interesting. That's all. Thanks for watching. 58. 18 Creating Baking Groups: Hello. This is Chapter 18 of doing the UVs and the Bk. So I've just imported my high poly and the low poly of all of the UVs I was just working on into MamzkTolbg and I'm going to give this a quick test bake to see what else I need to fix up here before doing the final Bk. So I'm just adjusting the max offset distance of the cage to be at a little bit more reasonable value. And now I'm setting up the output path. I just want to export over the same files that I baked last time, so I've just given them the same name and that way, I'll write over the same files, and I won't have a bunch of different copies of these bakes. So I just skipped through the whole bake. It took, you know, a couple seconds to bake there. So I've just cut that out in the footage here, so it was instant. And here's what the result looks like. I'm just going to set up the material so I can take a better look at it. Like I've said before, I like to put a slightly gray value down, and that slightly brings out more contrast in the bake. So this result is looking fairly good. This is only a 2048 textra and there is definitely enough resolution here, so I'm happy about that, but there are still a few lingering issues for one. There's some missing objects, all of those little loops from the belt. Um, missing because I'm going to be using just copies of the same single one around the whole mesh for that. And there's a lot of issues with clipping objects getting baked onto each other. So that's something I'm going to need to clean up by making a bunch of different baking groups, so none of these things intersect when they're baking. But other than that, just the fundamental aspect of there being enough resolution for this whole material group to work is working very well, and I don't have any extremely distorted UVs either. So now it's just these two other issues I need to sort out. I'm baking out an ambient occlusion map just so I can check how that one looks as well. And yeah, the immediate thing that is very obvious now is that I'm missing all of these extra loops that go around the belt in the low poly. So what I'm going to go and do right now is sort that issue out. I'll head back into three DS Max, and I'm going to duplicate around the single belt loop that I already have done next to the buckle here, and I'm just going to make clones of it, and those clones are going to share the same UVs as this one because I don't think it's a part that really warrants having unique UVs. So when it shares the UVs of when all of these share the same UVs, they're going to have the same exact texture, so they're all going to look exactly the same. But like I've mentioned before, because this is a fairly clean character, there's not a lot of grime or dirt on her, that's going to be fine. So there's no real reason to make all of these unique. And just having them all be copies of each other is going to be absolutely fine. It'll save me a little bit of work of having to texture all of them, and it will also save a little bit of texture space. So I think this is a fine solution. And you'll find this to be fairly common on characters like stuff like spikes and all those sorts of things, we'll usually share UVs so that the artists don't have to texture a bunch of them and also to save UV space. So I've just taken and duplicated that loop that was next to the buckle, and I'm just going to go around all of these belts and clone it and position it in a similar position to where they are on the high poly. And I'm not going to be baking these. I'm just going to be having these as copies, and they're going to be using the UVs from the single loop that is next to the buckle. That's the only one that's going to get baked, and all of the others are just going to use its UVs. So, yeah. As long as I just make copies of these and don't edit their UVs at all, they'll have the same exact position on the UV sheet. So there's nothing really more I have to do. I just have to duplicate these around, and it's usually best not to include these in any of the baking groups if you don't want them baked because if you have duplicate objects, baking onto the same UV space, you typically get errors. So I'm not going to be exporting these out together with the rest of the low poly. I'm going to be exporting them separately. And another thing to note is that I don't really need to be spot on with their positioning compared to the high poly because since they're not baking, the only reason why I'm trying to get them as close as possible is because just because of the second AO MP, the one that ignores baking groups. You know, I still want a little bit of that ambient occlusion shadow underneath these, so I need to make sure that they're roughly in the same place as the high poly. But because I'm not going to be baking, I know that they don't need to be in precisely the same spot, right? So I can be a little bit rough with this if I want to. And in fact, if you aren't planning to bake an AO, if you don't have any high poly objects like displaced, then you don't have to worry about this at all. And you can just put these low poly objects wherever you feel and if you still want ambient occlusion under them, you can just paint that in substance painter. You can just manually decide to paint it in on whichever objects you want to receive ambient occlusion from these. But in this case, you know, I'm not really above it. I just want to have them in roughly the same place as the hi poly is, but I don't need it to be pixel precise, right? I just need them to be in a similar position just so that the ambien occlusion shadows are in roughly the correct place. So I'm just going around and placing these. I'm almost done. I'm not making instances because in some cases, I'm scaling these ever so slightly, so they fit slightly better because not all of the high poly ones are the exact same scale either. So because of that, I'm not making them instances of each other. They're all unique objects, but they're all identical anyway. So yeah. Now for this little plastic clip thing that holds the pouches up, I also need to make a copy of that. And this is also going to show you these because this is a very small detail, and you actually can't see both of them at the same time. So that's another thing I sort of think about when I'm making copies of something. If there's a sort of part that you can't see both of at the same time very easily, then there's really no reason not to make a copy of the other object because if you can't see them both at the same time, you can't really tell that they are the same object. So that's the sort of thought process I apply to a lot of these things. So I've just taken the low poly of this little, you know, clip thing and duplicated it and flipped it around. I'm trying to position it as close as possible as I can to the high poly. I'm not going to be baking this again, so it doesn't have to be super precise, but I want it in roughly the correct position again so that the ambient occlusion shadows line up with it. Because the ambien occlusion shadows are going to get baked down onto the belt, but they're not actually there's nothing there's nothing that's actually going to be baked to this copy of this object. So, um just positioning it around and trying to get it into more or less the same position. But because I'm not going to be baking, I don't care too much about it being, you know, completely precise. I'm not going to be going into the coniform tools and doing what I did for the second copy of the pouch. I'm just going to move them around, so at least the footprint is in roughly the same place as it is on the high poly. So all of these duplicate meshes are in the correct position now, so I can export all of them, and I'm going to export them as a separate file. I'm not going to include them with the rest of the lower body because I don't want them to be involved in baking at all. I just want them to share textures and material with the baked objects. So I'm importing them into Mum's Tolbag now so I can take a look at them and make sure they're all okay. There's no issues like flipped normals or something like that, and that they're in the right position. So all of the belt loops look fine, but the little tab that holds up the pouches looks like it's got some really severe normal issues. So I'm headed into three years Max to fix those. Now, you can try and just match the normals between your copy and the original. That's what I tried to do for a while with the edit normals modifier, but it turned out to be more of a hassle than it was worth. So I'm just redoing it, and I'm making a copy, and this time I'm making sure not to mirror anything because in this case, this mesh sort of allows me to not mirror anything. If you're working on a different object where you have to mirror stuff, then that's a bit of a different manner. What you can do is use the Edit normals modifier and, there is an option to make explicit, and then any edits you make to the mesh will maintain the same normals, and you won't run into this issue. But in this case, it's too late for that because I already mirrored the object and flipped it. So the normals are already broken, and trying to reverse engineer them back to what they were, well, you know, I would have to go through the entire object and check all of the smoothing groups and then apply them to the copy. That wasn't worth the effort. So I just decided to do it over again. So doing everything the same except I didn't mirror it this time, so I wouldn't have to mess with the normals at all. Sometimes it's just easier to do something over again instead of trying to troubleshoot a bunch of weird issues. So that's what I decided to do this time. I'm just getting the position of the main body of this part right first, and then I'm going to move this end part into position as well. Like I said, for the belt loops, it's not essential that I get this spot on because these aren't going to be baked. I just want them in roughly the right place so that the ambient occlusion fits in nicely with these parts as well. So everything should be in the right spot. Now, I'm going to re export and take a look at this again in Mama zip Tool Bag. And see if that's fixed that error. So back in Mom's Tolbach, I can see that it's facing the wrong direction for some reason, which is a little bit unusual and reimporting it with the little reload button didn't work. So instead of that, I deleted the entire loci object and then imported it regularly, and that seemed to fix it. So I'm not sure what's going on there. That's honestly the first time I've had an issue like that of a reimported object being, you know, facing the wrong direction. Like that. So I'm not sure what's going on there, but just deleting the object and then importing it over again seemed to fix it. So that part's fixed. Now, moving on and taking a look at the few other things I need to fix. Looks like there's probably some duplicated vertices around there on the glove. So that's something I'm going to have to get around to fixing a little bit later. So while the bake is looking fairly decent from a distance now, there's still a few things I need to clean up. One of them is the smoothing groups, and the other one is objects clipping onto each other, or baking onto each other. So you can see the belt is sort of baking onto the top here and all of these things with the normal map basically. Now, this is actually something you kind of want with the ambient occlusion map because it sort of adds contact shadows and stuff, but it's not something you want in the normal map. You can see this is sort of not looking great. Like this ring is getting baked onto the rest of this thing. So what I'm going to have to do is split everything up into baking groups like I did for the last thing. And in the case of objects like this where it's a bunch of different little parts, it's quite an annoying process to do this, but it's unavoidable and it's something I have to do. I'm going to head into three MAX and start splitting up the high poly and the low poly into baking groups. So here I am in three S max. What I've done is I've imported the entire high poly. So these are all high poly meshes straight from Zbrush pretty much. And what I'm going to be doing is selecting these, putting them into layers so I can later export them out as baking groups, and I'm going to be splitting up the low poly into those corresponding baking groups that I make out of the high poly. Now, I'm doing this in three S max just because selecting things and putting them into layers is a little bit easier in three D Max and you know, selecting elements from the low poly. If your PC can't handle the entire high poly, you might want to do it in halves or break it up into chunks that your PC can handle. So just export one part of the high poly and import that into three S max and then break it up further into smaller baking groups if you want, or you can just break it up into baking groups in Z brush and then then import it into three S max and break up your low poly according to that using that high poly as a guide, or you can do everything in Z brush if you want. Import your low poly into Zbrush and then split it up into, you know, whatever folders you put your objects and zebush into and export it out that way. If you're doing it in Zbrush, you'll probably want to use auto groups to sort of split your low poly up into elements you can quickly select and mask and detach or split, as it's called in Zbrush. But I don't really like doing these sorts of things in Z brush just because, you know, the way the subtle list works, you can only select one thing at a time. I find it kind of tedious to work with all the subtols in the so because my PC can handle this, and it's not even that powerful of a PC, and it can handle 86 million drives somehow, I don't know how. But because I can handle it, I'm going to be doing this in three years Max. If you can't, you know, do it in chunks or do it in Zbrush. It doesn't really matter, just, you know, there are ways around it if you can't load up your entire hi poly at once. What I'm going to start doing now is selecting all these different parts or rather all these different high poly objects. These are just all of the subtols imported straight from Zebrush. So I'm just going to be selecting them. All of the ones that are sort of very close to another mesh to where they might bake onto each other. So, you know, these objects are baking onto the rest of the wrist band and then these belts and everything. So I'm just going to be splitting things up this way. Some of these high poly objects are, of course, attached to each other. So I'm going to have to do a little bit of extra work detaching these hi poly objects from each other. But mostly it's just going to be putting all these different things into different layers and then using those layers to select and export these objects separately. So I think that's all for my first round of selections. So once I've got them selected, I'll just click this little plus, and that will create a new layer. And I've named it as such. Now I can go ahead and hide all of the other hi poly objects leaving just this layer visible. And now I'll further break some of these objects up that are touching each other or too close to each other to bake nicely. And once I've got one detached, I'll just hide it, make it not visible and drag it back into the main stack of high poly objects. So I need to break up this object a little bit as well. Just detaching anything that's touching something else, basically. Unless those two objects merge together in the low poly, in which case, they're fine to be stuck to each other. They'll probably bake down fine and not leave any artifacts. If it's one object, if it's two separate objects, then that causes issues. And just dragging it off into the main pile once I'm done. So we'll be speeding up the footage here a little bit when there's less stuff going on on screen. I'm just going through and selecting all of the parts of these objects that are touching something else and only leaving the objects that aren't touching anything. So yeah, I just want to make sure that there's a gap around every single object so that stuff won't get baked onto each other. I actually made a little bit of a mistake here, which I'm going to fix in a minute. So if you take a look at those wires, what I actually meant to do here was detach the wires and leave that middle hexagon part in the baking group instead. So I'm fixing that now. I'm detaching the hexagon thing from whatever it was attached to before and moving it back into my baking group layer. Sometimes the scrolling of the outliner can be a little bit stborn. Now I'm taking the wires, detaching them from whatever they were attached to, and I'll just move these out of the baking group. And you can see now that there's nothing in this baking group that's really touching anything else. I'll get rid of these two straps, as well. Actually, there is one more thing I need to do, and that is to split up these ropes. So they're not touching each other? And I'm not naming any of these groups because it would be too hard to find a good name for them. So I'm purely working off of, you know, what they look like here. Just what's visible in the viewpoint, basically. Now, one more thing I have to detach is the bottom of these toe things. Now, I actually don't need the high poly for this side, so just to make the scene or the high poly object a little bit lighter, I can go ahead and delete them because I am only going to be baking one side for one shoe, and it's actually going to be sharing textures as well. That's something I can get away with on this model because the character is very clean, right? There's no dirt or wear and tear, really. That's going to be visible or there's not enough of it in the concept, and what I'm going to do for the final model for it to be something you can sort of tell is duplicated between the two boots. So something I can get away with here. In general, even if you have slightly muddy boots or something else that, you know, does have a little bit of wear and tear on it, you can get away with duplicating things if, you know, they're not right next to each other, and they're the types of things that you usually see from a different angle, right? So yeah, or if you can't see two of the same object at the same time easily, as well, then those times also, I will often just share the same exact texture for them. In this case, I'm doing it, you know, because I don't really want to texture the boots twice and all of that, and it won't really look any different if I just copy them. What it does also do is save you a little bit of UV space. So that's something to keep in mind if you're working on an actual production project that you can save UV space by duplicating parts. But yeah, in my case, I'm mainly doing it because I don't want to texture the shoes twice. So that's all for this high poly part of the baking root. Now I'll head over to the low poly. And I'm just selecting all of the elements that I see on the hi poly here that have hi poly counterparts because I've hidden all of the hi poly objects that aren't in this view baking group. So I just have the high polys that belong to this baking group visible, and I can sort of see them poking through the low poly as I make my selections. So all I need to do is select every single low poly element that has a high poly that I can see poking through it. So I'm just going to go through and Control click everything that it sort of has a gray object poking through. And I need to make sure that I definitely pick everything so there's no low polyps left behind because if I leave stuff behind, then later on, I'm going to have to go through and track it down and try and figure out, you know, what's missing from what baking groups. So that's a bit of a hassle. Try to get this right the first time around because it'll save you the trouble of having to track stuff down later on. Once I have everything selected, I just detach them from the rest of the low poly and I rename that object, something that will identify and let me know which high poly baking group it corresponds to. So I'm naming all of my high poly objects, layers, accessories high, one, two, three, four, and then all of the corresponding low poly parts of the baking group will be accessories low, one, two, three, four, and so on. I'm probably going to need three or four baking groups for this whole object. In total. So that's the first one done. I can hide everything that belongs to the first spoking group, so both the low poly and the high poly parts of the first baking group. And now I'm looking at my high poly objects, and I'm selecting everything that I want for the second baking group. So making sure not to select anything that touches another part, aside from objects that are sort of, you know, attached to each other as one object. Those ones, you know, I will also select and then detach the parts that are touching other parts. And move those out of the baking group. This is going to be what I'll be using for the second baking group. So I'm making a new layer and naming it appropriately, and I'm hiding everything else. And now I can go back to my low poly and start selecting these things. The same thing I did for the first baking group, basically, going through and selecting everything that I can see a gray. Now, for some of those string parts around the back, I haven't got the correct material applied to them on the low poly, so that's a little bit tricky for me to select them, but, you know, it's okay. I'm back at the hi poly here and I'm just detaching one of these parts that are in contact with another one. So this little strap with the key ring going through it, I detached it just so I can have that buckle by itself. And I'm going to do the same for this piece of string because it's also coming into contact with that other piece of string. And there's one more thing I need to do for the hi poly this baking group, and that's find this plastic detail and bring it into my baking group because those two objects are attached as one in the low poly, so I want them together in the hi poly baking group as well. Because any sort of objects that have been merged into one in the low poly need to be present together in that same baking group, if that makes sense. So now once more, I'm going through the low poly and selecting everything that I can see a high poly object poking through. So once I've made my selection, it's time to detach this and then rename the freshly detached object. So now I'm renaming it. I'm going to name it accessories, low too. I think I add in the low a little bit later. So I'm just making doubly sure that I have everything I need in both the low and high polyps of this baking group. You need to make sure that you get these things right. Otherwise, like I said earlier, it's going to be a pain to track down. And I'm moving on to the third baking group. So just selecting all of the parts that are far away in earth apart from each other. And I'm going to separate off the inside of this neck piece to a separate baking group. I'm not going to include it with the rest, just in case, you know, just in case the edges sort of bake onto each other, I will have it separate. And this one's going to be a small baking group because there's less and less objects that are remaining in contact with our objects as I go further through this list of high poly objects. So there's a few things I need to detach from each other here, like that pad behind the pouches and there's two clips next to the pouches because they sort of touch each other. So I need to make sure that they're detached. And I'll move those out of the baking group. Now over here, I'm going to detach the key ring and the piece of string and that little strap. They can stay in the baking group because they're far away enough apart from each other. And that should be everything for the high poly. So now I'm moving back to the low poly again and just selecting everything that looks like has a high poly object behind it. And I'm just leaving the label on that strap because I'm going to be moving it into a different group later on. So I've detached the low poly objects. So it's time to just double check that I have everything here and I'm going to rename them accessories low three. And I'm just adding the low back to that accessories low two just for consistency's sake. So there is my third baking group. And now getting back to that little label, I'm going to detach it from the low poly. And attach it back to accessories low one because that's where I left it in the baking groups, right? So I'm lucky I caught this mistake in time. I want to make sure those two are in the same, you know, corresponding baking groups. So time to move on to the fourth one. There's fewer and fewer objects remaining, but there's still quite a few objects that are touching each other. So I can take the lids off of the pouch. And that's one of the straps, maybe. And those two little bits of string, they're quite close to the hood. So I thought, you know, it'll just be a little bit easier if I detach them. And this will be the fourth baking group. Again, it's very small, but it's just because there's only a few things touching each other now, and, you know, it's the only way to split stuff up. You don't have to keep a consistent or even number amount of objects in every baking group, right? It's just a matter of separating things from each other, just so the baking goes more smoothly. So yeah, don't worry if you have one baking group with dozens of objects in it, and then another one with just a few. Now, you may have noticed that I also detached the cuff of the glove when I was doing this low poly part of the baking group. That's because I decided I was going to add that to this baking group, so I need to go back and do the high poly counterpart for the cuff, which I'm going to get to in a moment. Right now, I'm just going to make sure that I got this piece of string into the right baking group as well. So I've just attached it to the second baking group, and now I'm double checking that I have it in the right one. And I'm going through everything and checking all of the baking groups as I go along. Now, back to the hi poly, I need to detach this cuff, but as you can see, this cuff is also attached to the rest of the glove. So instead of detaching it, I'm going to detach it as clone. And this way, the cuff will be duplicated and I'll be able to have it in both baking groups. That's the only way you can do things that sort of belong to two baking groups as on. You just need to duplicate it and include it in both of them. So that's this baking group done, and I can take a look at anything else that needs to split up to be split up. So by the looks of it, it's just this one pad behind the belt that I need to detach, and that's all that's going to be in this baking group. So, yep, there we go. One object in this one, so it's going to be nice and quick to set up. And I'll leave all of the remaining objects in this last baking group, and I can go ahead and detach this one from the low poly. And drag it and rename it appropriately. So accessories low accessories low five. And then I'll rename this one accessories low six, and it will be time to export everything. So I need to make sure that I export all of the low poly parts separately. So I'm going to end up with six FBX files for the low poly accessories low, one, two, three, four, five, six, and then I need to do the same for the high poly as well. So I need to select every layer and then select all of the objects that belong to the layer. There is a special button for that. I'll show you in a moment. I'm putting all of these in a single folder when I'm exporting just to make them a little bit easier to find. And for the hi poly, you don't want to triangulate because it takes a little bit longer for it to export when you triangulate stuff. So if you go to the select hierarchy button up there, when you select a layer, it will select all of the objects that belong to it. So there's accessories high five. And here is accessories high four. And yeah, I'm just going to go through and export all of these out separately. Make sure you name them the correct name when you export because otherwise it get really confusing once you import them into Mum's toolbag if they're named the wrong way, then you'll get confused as to which baking group to put them in. So second to last baking group, accessories High two, making sure everything's selected here. And time for the last one. So this is the last high poly baking group. And now I can go ahead and export the low poly. And I'll just do all the low poly objects in one go for now. And now to go into Mom Tolbag and check how things work. So I've already set everything up in Mom's E all over again. Just put in the low and the high poly objects into the corresponding baking groups. I actually had to split up the last and the biggest baking group into two sections for the hi poly when I export it because it just wouldn't import into Mama's Tolbag for some reason. You can actually still see the error message down here. So if you have this issue, it may help to simply split that up into two halves. But you don't have to do anything to the low poly. When you're splitting it in half, you know, you can just select half of the objects in the outliner and export them, and then select the other half. It doesn't matter because I'm going to be lumping them all into the same group in Mam Z toolbg anyway. So that doesn't make a difference. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a bake and see what the result looks like. Okay, so let me zoom in and take a look at what's going on. So you can see all of the previous issues of stuff baking onto other objects are gone, and it actually looks really clean. Aside from the minor issue of the smoothing groups still being all messed up and giving me a bunch of seams and lines down the surface normals, like you can see here, but that's a quick, easy fix. In terms of clipping, I've solved that issue, so now I can move on to sorting out those lines. Of course, there may still be areas where I need to manually adjust the cage a little bit, but that's something I'll do after I have finalized the actual geometry. See here because this is all just one object, this is something I need to adjust to the actual cage with you know, the baking cage distance. But now I'm going to go and finish up the smoothing groups. So I'm going to head back into three Max and work on the low poly a little bit more. But I'm going to be leaving that for the next chapter. So that's going to be all for this chapter. And in the next chapter, I'll be figuring out all of the smoothing group issues and hopefully doing the final bake for the accessories. And from there, I'll be able to move on to the last material group, which is going to be the mechanical arm and all of those hard surface parts. So thanks for watching. 59. 19 Fixing Smoothing Groups And Topology: So a few things to clean up on the low poly. This little issue here with these two holes, just going to cap them off and cut them up into quads or triangles, probably. Then there is this clipping issue, trying to figure out which mesh is causing it's this one. I think this can just be remedied by adding a cut down the middle here. Okay. And I think what I did was I deleted my hi polys to make the scene a little faster, and now I'll have to re input them again. So I brought back my high poly and now I can see what's going on with this low poly, what I have to move around here. And yeah, this looks like a pretty glaring issue. I'm not sure why I didn't, notice this in the first place. But, um, I guess these things happen. So I'm just going to move these vertices into the right spots. And this should do it. Now I'll check for any more clipping issues, and I think that's all there was to it. There's kind of a bit of wonky stuff going on here. I think maybe adding in a few cuts will help. These are just vertex normals. Actually, if I show you the normal map here, so this is that area where you see the triangulation on the actual normal map. And you can see that this doesn't look great. And while it might look okay in Mama sit tool Bag, you know, it just looks slightly unprofessional when you have stuff like this, and it may cause compression issues. It's not too big of a deal these days, but still it's probably something that if you can easily fix, then go ahead and fix it. And in any breakdowns, your normal map will look just that tiny bit better. If I go down here. I think if I just add a few cuts along the triangulation, maybe that will help slightly. Let's see. It has helped a little bit. I'll add in a few more of these cuts along the triangulation and hopefully that will alleviate the issue more or less. Yeah, that's a slight improvement. And I'll do the same for the other side, although it does look like I've already done it here. In this case, maybe this will be good enough, I suppose. The same here. Again, it's like a major thing, but it will make your normal math slightly better. The main issue here is the smoothing groups. I'm quickly just going to set all of them to one. So onto fixing the smoothing groups, if I take a look at the model in general, you can see that in a lot of areas, the smoothing groups are just messed up entirely or some objects just aren't smoothed at all. So those are really obvious to fix. In general, what I found is that one smoothing group for the whole object will work most of the time realistically. It's not too much of an issue, but for a slightly better result, and what typically happens in a professional environment when you're working on an actual production is most of the time, there will be one smoothing group assigned to each UE island. Smoothing groups are basically the same as hard edges in other software. I think three DS MAX is maybe the only software that does smoothing groups instead of hard or no hard edges. So basically the boundary between two different smoothing groups if I go down to the smoothing group panel here. I need to add an Edit poly to access it just a moment. So if I go down to the smoothing root panel, basically, it works the same way as hard edges or soft edges, but I guess it gives you the extra functionality of being able to select these smoothing groups. I don't find that all that useful. It is maybe slightly more tedious than just selecting and defining hard edges. But basically, the boundary between two different smoothing groups is maybe not so visible on this flat object. Let me find something round. So the boundary between two smoothing groups sort of becomes a hard edge. And, you know, there's a few ways you can blend these things. So if I give this one the third group, there is a hard edge between these two and the polygons around it. But if I also give it the first group, then it's smooth between these two and hard between this one and, um, smooth between this plane and hard between that one. So you can blend these things together and all that to just really put the hard edges wherever you want them. But in general, the rule for hard edges is to never really have them in the middle of your U V island because those will show up in the bake, just like you've seen in the marmosep file already. If you have hard edges in the middle of an object on a flat area, they are very obvious, and even on bent surfaces, they are still visible. The only case in which they really aren't visible is when they are on the border of a UV seam, because those areas are treated a little bit differently, right? They're sort of independent from each other, either sides of the seam. So in those areas, having hard edges is not visible, and in fact, it makes your normal map slightly better in terms of sort of output, the sort of gradients it has and such. So while one smoothing group across your entire model, I would say 90% of the time looks fine. If sometimes you have some sort of strange shading issues like maybe the corner of some object is very dark or something like that. That's typically how you would solve it. It's just to have smoothing groups for each UV island. And that typically improves things somewhat. Because it slightly lessens the gradients across your UV map. If the gradients are too high, basically, the values within the normal map won't be large enough to compensate for the difference in vertex normals, because that's all a normal map really is. It's the difference between the normals, the surface normals of the high poly and the low poly. So if the normals are really different or there is a large variation across a few polygons between the low poly and the high poly, sometimes the normal map can't quite compensate for it, and having some hard edges will help with that. So to automatically assign a different UV island for a different hard a different smoothing group for each UV island, there is a very handy tool within text tools if you click this drop down and select smoothing groups from UV shells. And it will add an edit poly where all of those new smoothing groups are stored. And you can see now there are a few seams between these UV islands for me in here. So this is how I'm going to handle those, and I'm just going to apply this automatically to all of the objects because on a sort of mostly soft surface object like this, it really doesn't need any extra attention. All of these things should bake fine with just this applied. So there we go. I can go ahead and export this and try another test bake. Make sure that you're triangulating your exported mesh as always. So I've done a quick bake off screen. I also changed up the color of the background to make it a little bit easier to see. And you can see that there is none of that weirdness from the smoothing groups anymore. It all looks pretty clean. There's a couple of clipping issues here or something along those lines. There might be issues with the actual mesh. I'm not sure. Another thing I'm going to have to go through and check. But yeah, that's another thing off the checklist. No more weird issues with the smoothing groups, so I can move on. Actually, why is this still here? So I've re imported the low poly and re baked it. I also changed the background color a little bit to make it easier to see. And if I zoom in, you see there are no more weird issues of hard little seams showing up on the model. It's all nice and smooth. Now that I've sorted out the smoothing groups. So that's one more thing of the checklist of things I need to clean up. There are a few more issues like this clipping. So that's what I'm going to maybe do now. I just want to check everything right before I do that. And yeah, I think I might start working on clipping issues. So it's just an issue of adjusting the baking cage distance to something appropriate. And it's a little bit easier if you work on one group at a time. Just because it will be easier to see. Now, setting it too low will give you a bunch of clipping issues where the baking cage isn't rising out of the low poly, which is also bad. And that will mean you'll have to do a lot of work of painting out higher values across your entire model. Because in Mom ZTolbg what you can do is, I think I've shown this in the previous chapter, you can paint either a lower cage distance or a high cage distance onto your low poly, and that sort of affects the baking cage. It's a really nice system. It's the only software I'm aware of that lets you bake in this way. It's very convenient, and it's why everyone loves Mum's Ze toolbg for baking. Because otherwise, you would have to manually model in this cage in three years Max or something like that, and that is a bit of a hassle, and it's much easier to just do this. One thing you will want to do is not to bake an ambient occlusion map every time. It's easier to only do normal maps and make sure your ambient inclusion map is turned off, because if you're not re baaking the ambient occlusion map, you'll be just seeing the old one and you'll be wondering why none of the issues you're trying to fix by painting out the cage are changing. So yeah, if you want to offset the cage more, then it's a white value. If you want to offset the cage less, then it's gray value or a black value. You want the cage to be smaller in areas where different parts of the cage are clipping into each other. You want the value to be higher where you have little spots like this where the cage isn't quite reaching these parts of the high poly. Now, with normal maps, they will get automatically re baked. That makes this a very quick process. You don't have to manually go and click the bake button or update anything yourself manually. You can change your cage capacity to be a little bit lower if you're having trouble seeing. And, yeah, just go through and touch up on all of these spots where you have these issues. You can also do this in the To D view. So I can just but, you'll have to find whichever island you're working on in the To Divie if you don't remember it exactly. Now, if you're maxing out your values and it's still not getting fixed, then that means you need to increase the max offset distance. Don't make this too high because then you'll have to paint a lot of areas down lower and don't make it too low, either. Okay. Increasing the max offset will increase across the entire mesh. So, it also increases the middle offset basically because it's arranged between these two values, right? So your mid value will also get higher as you increase the max offset. So that's something you need to be aware of. So make sure you don't set a max offset that's way too small from the beginning because then you might have to redo a lot of your painting. In general, usually you'll have your mint offset at zero, you'll always be able to make the cage smaller to the point where it's right where the low poly is, but you won't always be able to make it a lot higher. On the other hand, if you set your max offset too high, then you'll have to paint a lot of areas back, so that's also annoying. So there is a little bit of a problem area here, but it's going to be covered by a buckle, so I will leave it, and it's sort of scrunched up in there anyway. It's kind of like a gap underneath something else. So I'm not too concerned about it. Now, this is all a little bit Llorez because I have the samples very low on the bake and I don't have any smoothing just to make baking faster. Even at the same resolution, I will make this look quite a bit better without any of this stepping and aliasing as soon as I improve the baking settings, it's just that they take longer to bake, and that's not convenient for these, you know, when you're still working on the mesh. So this area is also quite hidden and it will be hidden by an occlusion map. It'll probably look better, once I have the ambient occlusion on there. Okay. This is looking fairly clean. I'll move on to the other areas and I'll quickly go through this entire model. Moving on to this glove, need to check if this is an issue with the cage or not. So over here it was. And over here, it's not. That's an issue with the actual model, probably. And same over here, so I'm going to go to my Loy poly and check. It's probably double vertices or something like that. That's what it looks like to me right now. So if you go into XVw, you can select overlapping vertices and it will highlight them for you. It's probably a good idea to check this before you export your model, actually. So all of the duplicated vertices or overlapping vertices will be highlighted green when you have X view turned on. So it's a really useful tool for finding these things. And yeah, you should probably do this earlier in the process. Maybe as soon as you're done with topo, just do a pass and check for overlapping vertices. In this case, I sort of ended up forgetting for a while and kind of left it for last. Maybe it's a little bit late in the process, but there's no harm done, right? It doesn't really matter when you do this. Um, so yeah, I'm going to have to go through every single part of the low poly here and just double check for these vertices that are overlapping and in general, check the mesh for any errors that might be remaining. Yeah, I did end up finding quite a few of them on the low poly for the accessories, I guess, just because of, you know, how many small objects there are here and all the retper work I had to do on those. So I'm just looking for the last one, wherever it is. It's hiding from me. I can just do a blanket weld across the whole model. I don't like doing that though, just in case there's a vertice that it accidentally welds that I wanted to keep. But if I set this to a very low value, just even lower than past what the spinner will let you do. Spinner will set it to zero, zero, but I like to put in a bunch of decimal points first. It doesn't always work. So that's why, yeah. That's why I'm still hunting for this vertex, because sometimes welding everything doesn't work, and sometimes if you're not careful, it will weld something that you don't want to weld. So I try not to do that, unless I really have to, and there it is. It was on the bottom of the shoe. So, of course, I didn't see it. And the reason why that very, very low weld distance didn't work is because they're quite close to each other. But on another part of a model, I might have two vertices very close to each other for a reason, maybe like a little shamFA or something like that. In which case, you know, I don't want to get rid of stuff like that. So yeah, that's why, you know, you can use the world's tool with very low distance to get rid of any overlapping vertices sometimes, but you do need to be careful with it and not just immediately do it as soon as you run into an issue. I'll do this for all of the remaining subtols or objects. And in fact, I've remembered that there's a few edges that I need to get rid of on the back of some of these faces. So I'll go ahead and do that as well. So again, here, these weren't actually overlapping edges or rather they are overlapping edges, but they're edges that I want to keep because the issue with these is just that they got moved down somewhere where they shouldn't be. So if I welded these, you know, I would sort of lose this topology. It's not exactly something I want. So I've deleted my hypoly I'm going to cheat a bit and just eyeball their position. Based off of the vertices around them. You probably shouldn't do this. You probably shouldn't just delete your high polly every time. I think you're done, but I need to keep the recording smooth, and having those high poly measures in there can sometimes mess with the recording, especially if I have Mama set to Bag open as well. So I keep deleting them, and I keep not having them on hand in this, you know, file of me doing the unwrap. So bear with me here. But, yeah, it's a little technical issue I have to work through. And, yeah, I'm just going to cheat and not cheap, but, you know, eyeball it. Those vertices probably ended up in the right place, I'm sure, and I'll see if they didn't, in the actual resulting bits. Now here, there is a little optimization I could do. I could weld these vertices to each other. And realistically, this is probably something you should do. But also, you know, tiny optimizations like these, um, they are what you should do. But sometimes they will not be appreciated if you don't zoom in and show them in your wireframes. So, you know, sometimes it's something I either forget or skip. You know, it is okay to sometimes have stuff that isn't perfectly optimized, but be smart about it. Don't put it in the, you know, I still has to make sense. So yeah, don't put it in areas where it's going to be very obvious and stuff like that. I get the impression that maybe this is an object that I forgot to optimize a little bit. So there's definitely edges I can get rid of here. Yeah, I can be forgetful with these, probably a good idea to get rid of them now. Let's see. I remember I wanted to delete the back faces of these as well because none of these faces are visible. Again, optimizing stuff like this on a personal project probably isn't going to be appreciated unless for some reason, the person looking at it had access to the actual model. You know, most of the time that doesn't happen. So I don't know, do without information what you will. In a professional environment, you would be expected to delete stuff like this and have it on your model. When you're making your portfolio pieces, you can sort of cheat on these things and skip them. But probably, you know, especially if you're a beginner, keep to best practices, industry practices and don't be too lazy. Because, you know, these are things you sort of need to learn and remember. So before I fix these moving hoops on this object, I want to slightly optimize the back of these belts because I remember that I left a few too many edges back here. As you can see, I don't need this many on the back side. But I can't remove all of them, and I'll show you why I can't remove all of them if I remove all of these edge loops around the back. You see it sort of breaks the shading. While this could probably still bake down fine into a normal map, there would be a severe gradient across it. It would probably still look okay, but the normal map would look better if I left the two external edge loops. So if I just delete all of these, you can see that shading is more or less fine. So, I am going to keep the two external edge loops. Alternatively, the other way you can approach this is to split it up into more UV islands. So if I split off the entire back half like this, then, then it would probably shade better because I could have a hard edge on both the top and the bottom. The downside with that is the more the islands you have, the more padding you need around them, the more scattered around there are. It's a little bit easier for me if I just unwrap these belts into one section. There's less seams and less everything to deal with. With the drawback that, you know, I'll probably need to have two extra edge loops around the edges, but that's really not anything to worry about. So yeah, I'm going to get to work on removing all of those internal edge loops, but not these two ones around the edges. So to do that, I need to hide some of these faces. And I'll go ahead and delete these. And I can weld these up right now. Because I broke the edge loop there, I should be able to select these loops without selecting through to the front side, that's good because I do want to keep these front loops that are contributing to this silhouette. I just don't need them around the back. That's the internal portion fixed. I'm going to get rid of a few of these faces around the front as well. Because they also aren't contributing to the too much. Like so. That'll be all I'll be doing for this belt. Now to do the same on the next one. Looks like I audtly selected a face Test so I'm going to have to unhide all and try and make this selection again. And you're going to do the same around the front like I did on the other side or on the other belt, rather. There we go and one more belt to go. And to I forgot, I maybe did a few too many. And I can unhide everything, make my selections. Um. This one has both ends, so I'm going to have to do the same thing around here. And I'll do that thing around here as well. And that should be all that I wanted to do here. So now I can do the smoothing groups with text tools. Okay, so the text tools thing has done the smoothing groups for me. Now, one more thing I want to check is I did mess around with the geometry of some of these parts, and I want to make sure that it all looks fine in the UV map. And it's mostly okay. Aside from one of these edges was moved out of position. One of these looks like it's in the wrong place too. But that might be an overlapping vertex. Not sure. I'll have to double check. Let's see, same issue here. And the rest look fine. I'll an extra edit poly just to check that odd vertex I saw over here. It must be nothing or maybe it's not sure. Let's see. There's one here? That I will just well and there's two more somewhere, right down here. Okay. I had another just just to be sure with that vertex that I saw. It's right down here. Yeah. So probably was out of position. That's probably going to be a little bit better. So all of these are done now. I can go ahead and re export them. One thing I did remember that I was missing from my low poly was the headband or hair band. I completely forgot to retopo this, and I just remembered at the last minute that I still need to do this. So I'm just duplicating the high poly here and I'm going to use it to make the low poly. The first thing I tried was the retpology modifier. It's a fairly new modifier that was added a few years ago into three Max, and it can pretty often give you a really good retopper result. I do recommend looking up people that have integrated that into their workflow, both when subdivision modeling and when doing retopper. In this case, I probably could have gotten it to work and give me a result that I wanted. But I thought because this is just pretty much cylindrical object, it would just be faster to use the select every other edge loop tool or selection function and just select every other edge loop a couple times until I got to the rough polycunt that I wanted. Instead of having to mess around with all the different options in the modifier because they're not immediately intuitive, and it can get a while to dial in the exact result you want. So instead of doing that for a simple object like this, just selecting every other edge loop a few times will very quickly cut down the polygon to roughly where I want it. Now I'm just playing around with where exactly I want the edge chamfer to be placed, how wide I want it. And I'm just doing that by adding in swift loops and then deleting the loops around them to sort of reposition where that chamfer or, you know, those edge loops around the edges of this headband are because I don't want to leave them at just, you know, straight 90 degree angles. I do want to chamfer around this edge because it is quite a soft edge, so I think it would benefit from this. But I couldn't figure out a good placement like that. So instead, I'm just removing all of the excess edges, and I'm going to select all of them, and then use the ShamfA button to just apply an even chamfer to all of them. It's a little bit hard to see, though with the hi poly there, so I'm just going to make the hipoly transparent. And if an object isn't going transparent, you just go to object properties and set it to by object and not by layer. And I've just applied a sham to all of the edges here, and I'm going to go over with the conform brush just to conform those freshly hamford edges to the high poly, and this should be good enough for the low poly here. So I'm just taking a look at it. Now, this headband isn't like a hard surface cylinder, really. It's a little bit uneven around the edges. I think it's meant to be some sort of elastic materials, so that's why, you know, there is some inconsistency about its width and stuff. In the low poly. That's absolutely normal. Now I'm using the edit normals modifier just to fix all the normals here. I've just selected all of the normals and unified them. And now I need to do a quick arm wrap on this part. So I'm just going to select one edge and split the model along there and then split the model along one edge loop vertically, and I can use the pelt mapping tool to pelt it to weld all those islands together. And then quick peel it to get my pretty close to the final result I want and rectangularize. And there's the UVs for this subject. Now I'm going to have to find some way to squeeze them in with all of the rest of the UV islands, pack them in wherever I can, which might be a little bit tricky because I haven't exactly left a lot of space in the UVs. So yeah, it will be a bit of a struggle to fit it in there, but I'm going to have to try. So the first thing to do is to match the UV Texel density with all of the other islands. So the first thing I need to do is normalize it in terms of scale compared to all of the other things. Textol does have a sort of where you can do this. This button will sample textool ratio. And then you can apply it to another object. The problem is, it doesn't really work across multiple objects when you have the modifier applies to several objects. I found that it doesn't quite work. So I'm just going to eyeball it and do it manually using the texture checker. So if I change the scale a bit of the texture checker to maybe four. This makes it small enough to where I can figure out how big this part is in relation to others. Now it is vertically a bit long, so I can squash it down firstly. I'm looking for these letters to look square and also for the squares to look square, and I think they do now. And now I can scale it in relation to everything else. I'm just looking for these letters to be the same size as the ones here. So let's see. It looks like about the right size. It might be easier to just tell using the checker pattern and setting the checker tiling even higher. In which case, I don't really have to look for letters or anything. Something like this, that's pretty big. It's going to be a little bit tricky to fit this in somewhere, unfortunately. Um Let's see. It doesn't quite fit in here, but what I can do is just give it two scenes and actually solve the issue. What's this point. It looks like some of these are not quite the right scale. It might be easier to fit this in than I thought. If I just spend a little bit of time normalizing it better. So that's an issue that can commonly happen with this tool, just because of the way it works and straighten things out, it's not ideal. It's a little bit better to straighten things out using these two buttons. It's slightly slower, but it gives you a more accurate result, and it doesn't move edge loops out of alignment like that tool does. So I'm going to select all these edge loops that go horizontally. You've seen me do this before and do the same for all the vertical ones. I'll just select another loop here to make it faster. There we go and straighten all these out. Now you can see how this compares in scale to the other parts. It looks like these are quite a bit smaller, so I can probably scale it down a bit more, a little bit more, maybe something like this. Comparing the size of the squares here and here. Maybe they are a tiny bit smaller still. Um, it's kind of hard to tell, but this is close enough in terms of textual density. This should do. And I think this will fit now. Let's have to move some of these around a bit in order to get that extra room. If you can't make a selection because another lines on top, you can go into Vertex mode and selected by vertices. There were a few other spots where I could fit stuff in. Make sure to leave enough padding around items or items. And just two more to go. And there's a special spot for that one right there. Okay. Found room for this extra object in the UV map. I can go ahead and export all these now. And I'll see how this turns out. So that's that fixed in terms of all the geometry and smoothing groups. So last thing to do is just take care of all these minor clipping issues. And that'll be that I may want to make some caps to sort out the inner caps of the gloves as well. That might make them a little bit nicer, and that'll be all for the accessories. And yeah, this is probably the most troublesome and annoying part to deal with, especially straightening out all those tiny UV islands. The rest of this should go, you know, the last part, the body should go a little bit faster. So yeah. Thanks for watching, and that's going to be all for this chapter. 60. 20 Finishing Mech Arm Uv's: Welcome to Chapter 20 of UV mapping and baking. In this chapter, I'm going to start working on the mechanical arm. But right before I do that, I want to check the texle density of the accessories and the body material that I've done already. So what I like to do for checking textil density in three years Max is applying this sort of checker pattern to all of my materials and then comparing how big the squares are across the different materials. So I've already done this for the accessories, and now I'm going to show you how I set it up. So under the general panel, you can find sort of checker texture generator, and you can turn up the tiling to however much you like and make sure you put in the same tiling value for every single one. So in this case, I set 20, and then I just set up some colors for each checker pattern so that I can identify every single material. So for the accessories, I picked two greenish shades, and for the body, I pick two bluish ones, and then I plug that into the color map channel. And now I can very easily compare the textile density of the two parts. I can see that these are fairly close in terms of textile density. Maybe the accessories are 10% higher and that's absolutely fine. This is actually a better result than I was expecting. You can just compare the size of each square and decide if that's a good enough textile density and if things are consistent enough across different islands. This is a pretty good result. I'm pretty happy that you know, with the consistency of the textile density, the accessories are maybe a little bit more dense than the rest of the body, but that's okay because they're also a little bit more detail, and they're not going to be able to rely on microtailulin textures like the fabric of the body will be able to. So yeah, just check your textil density, make sure that everything is roughly the same resolution. It doesn't have to be spot on. Things can be a little bit bigger or smaller than each other in terms of density, just because you're never going to be able to get it 100% the same across everything. It just has to be, you know, not like twice as high in terms of resolution on one object compared to another. And I didn't actually check the textile density of the face because that doesn't really matter. You're always going to have the face being a higher resolution than the rest of the body and all of that. So there's no real reason to check the face. It's going to be in a texture all by itself anyway, and it's always going to be higher resolution than the body. So I'm moving on to straightening out the UVs for the mechanical arm and, you know, all the remaining parts. So it's very similar to what I've been doing for all of the other parts. You know, I'm kind of a one trick pony when it comes to doing UVs. I just use these tools for pretty much everything. One thing I should address while I'm still early into this episode is that if you remember where I left off in the last one, I was about to move on to fixing all the cage offsets, all of the baking cage offsets for the accessories, so I could do the final bake on the accessories. And in this chapter, you can see that I've just moved straight on to the mechanical arm. And yeah, I am aware of this. I definitely haven't forgotten that footage or left it out accidentally. It will still all be there. It's just that when I was recording, I wrapped up recording there on that day. So I wrapped up recording just as I was about to start painting the offsets, and then the next time, by the next day when I got around to recording, you know, I forgot that that's where I left off, and I just assumed that I was finished with all of the accessories, and I already did the bakes. And I just moved on to doing this mechanical arm here. So I do get around to painting the offsets and doing the final bake. Eventually, it's just that I end up doing that after I do this mechanical arm. And I didn't want to heavily edit things and sort of, you know, edit those later recordings back in time into, you know, just to have things in order because that would sort of mess with continuity, and it would be very tricky to get things to work that way. So yeah, sorry that this is a little bit confusing that things are out of order, but I do promise if you stick with me while I do the mechanical arm, I do eventually get to painting all of the offsets for the accessories. So no footage is left out. It's just going to be a little bit out of order. If you want to skip ahead and see me do the accessories, you know, the final bake for those, then you can do that. If you're following along closely and you just want to have everything done, you know, in order, and a little bit more cohesively, then yeah, feel free to skip ahead to those chapters. If not, then I do eventually get to that. It's just going to be after I finish up the mechanical arm. And this doesn't take long, so I will be getting to that very soon. So don't worry about it. And thanks to understanding. Now, I'll get back to doing commentary on what's going on on screen. So I'm just straightening out this sort of doughnut shaped part that makes up the elbow, and I'm making sure not to leave the ends completely straight because if you take a look at the three view or the three D model, you can see that I've had to cut the seam there kind of jaggedly. So I'm making sure to maintain that in the UVs, as well, because if I straightened it out, it would be a little bit deformed, although even if I did do that, because that areas quite hidden, it wouldn't make too much of an issue. So yeah. I'm also going to straighten out some of these internal lines because I feel like they've gotten really stretched out as I've been using the Peel tool here, when in reality, in the three D view, they're pretty much perfectly straight. So it's probably best if I straighten them out instead of leaving them all one key. And in general, I, you know, just like with the other parts, I'm going to try and straighten everything that I can out. So this little part that goes over the elbow, I'm also straightening out. Even though it might be not 100% straight in three D space, still, it's going to be easier to pack, and it'll have nicer cleaner unaliast edges if I do this. So I'm going to go ahead and straighten these parts out. Just using the peel tool as usual, I find it does a great job straightening this stuff out. But you may have noticed at the start of the video, I took a few of these islands and I just dragged them off to the side outside of the main island. And that's basically just all the islands that I know are basically already done. I don't really have to do anything to those rectangular ones or the circular end caps of the cylinder because they're already perfectly fine the way they are. The only thing I'm going to have to do with them is just align them to the pixel grid so make sure they're, perfectly square with the grid squares here. And there is actually a function in text tools for doing that for aligning islands to the grid. So I'll be showing that off a little bit later. And right now, I'm going to work on this forearm a bit. So you may be tempted to straighten a part like this out into, like, a complete rectangle, just, you know, pull the sides apart and make it rectangular. And, you know, that might be something you can actually pull off. You can try experimenting with it a bit and try both setups. I would probably be fine. But I was a little bit worried about distortion just because of how much narrower this part gets towards the wrist. So I thought it might be a little bit better if I just left it the way it was and have it wider towards the top as opposed to trying to, you know, fit this into a rectangle just to avoid that extra bit of defamation. Um, and actually, for a lot of these parts of the arms, there's not too much straightening out I can really do. I can sort of try and think ahead and get them into sorts of shapes that are going to make them as easy to pack as I can make. But overall, these are kind of complex, irregular shapes. So there's only so much flattening out and straightening I can do. So I've just turned on the high poly here so that I can see where the panel lines are placed on this arm so that I can split this UV island into a few more parts, which is going to make it a little bit easier to pack around. So by breaking it up a little bit along those seams, it's going to be a little bit easier for me to fit everything into one UV square. And I'm tempted to break this top seam off as well, because that will let me, you know, get rid of that little loop that goes around the shoulder. And that would let me align this island to maybe one of the sides of the UV grid square or at least another island. Straight edge is always easier to deal with. But I'm going to leave that for later when I have more of the UV islands done, so just so I can see, you know, if I really need to do that. I'm going to split off the end caps of these parts because right now this isn't a very efficient way to unwrap this island. I'd probably be better to split this along the side and flatten it out that way. That's what I'm going to do. So I split off the end cap, and now I can flatten this one out. I just need to disconnect one of these vertices. And while that's still kind of wonky and, you know, there's a lot of sort of space around those curves that isn't going to be easy to use properly. It's still better than having it splayed out like this, because if you have stuff projected this way or unwrapped this way, then, you know, you're getting a lot less resolution towards the middle and all of the outside parts really stretched out. So you always want to flatten stuff out lengthwise. I find instead of just squashing it down this way. Unless it's just, like, a bolt or a screw or, like, the top of the cylinder, in which case, sometimes I will do that instead of, you know, breaking it up more so I'm going to apply the texture checker material to the arm as well, just so I can compare the textile density of it to the other two islands, because, you know, I want all of these things to be more or less even. So I need to figure out a way to get this to be roughly the same resolution as the body and the accessories. Right now it's looking quite a bit too dense, right? It's at least twice as dense as the rest of the body. So I'm going to attach the forearms and see how it looks with those. And even with the forearms attached, it looks quite a bit more dense than the body. So I'm thinking that maybe I can have this texture at half the resolution of the rest of the textures. So to check that, you just enter half of the tiling value that the other texture checkers have. So if the other ones have 20, for this one, I entered ten, and sort of lets me visualize how this texture would compare if it was half the resolution of the other ones. So right now these grid squares are quite a bit bigger than all the others. So I'm going to see if slightly packing these islands together more gets me closer to the result I want. Because if I look at the UVs now, you can see that a lot of the space isn't being used properly. So hopefully, if I properly pack these islands together, I might get closer to the textile density of the remaining parts, and that would really be great. Again, you don't have to be perfectly precise with the textile density. It can be off by a little bit. But what I have for the arm right now is a little bit too much. So I'm just scaling things up until they match the textile density of the rest of the body, and then I'll be able to see if that's at all viable to squeeze into one texture square. So that's a good way to go about it, I think. Just select all of your UV islands and scale them to where they match the scale of the rest of the UVs. And then you can see if it's going to be at all possible to fit that into the grid square. So I am testing twice the resolution or rather the same resolution as the body and half the resolution as the body, just to see which one I can get to fit. Again, in this case, I don't really care about the actual resolution of the texture I'm using. I just want it to be consistent with the rest of the body. So I don't want the arms to be either much higher resolution or much lower resolution than the rest of the body. When you're working on an actual project that needs to be optimized and run well on someone's computer, then, you know you need to look at your budgets and how you can distribute them most efficiently. On a personal project like this, I don't really care about efficiency, so I don't mind using the same resolution texture as the rest of the body. I'm not trying to squeeze this into a smaller one. I'm just trying to have it consistent with the rest of the body, so it's not much higher or much lower resolution. And like I said, you can be a little bit imprecise, so it can be slightly lower or higher, but it needs to be in the rough ballpark. Now I'm going to rotate these rectangular islands so that they're aligned with a pixel grid. And for that, there is this button in textils. There is a line button. So what you need to do to get it to work is just select one edge, and then it will align that island according to that edge. So you just select one edge. If you select multiple edges, it won't work, then you just hit the line button, and it will rotate it to the closest direction in the UV grid. So, if it's closer to a horizontal angle, then it will rotate it to be horizontal. If it's closer to a vertical angle, then it will rotate it to be vertical. So that's really useful for getting these lined up with the pixel grid, and, you know, it'll be this way, you won't be off at all, and you won't have to fiddle around with manually trying to figure out the correct rotation. It'll always be perfectly precise. And yeah, what I'm trying to do is get all of these islands fitted into one UV square because what I did is I scaled them all roughly to the textile density I need for them to be comparable to the rest of the body. So the scarf on the back is a very nice flat part, which makes it easy for me to line up and get the same textile density. You can see the grid squares across the back of the scarf and the arm are roughly the same size, and that's what I'm using to align these two parts. And I'm going to try and fit everything into one square. I don't know if this is possible. I just want to try it because that would solve the entire headache of textil density for me. If I can fit everything into this square, then that would be great. So it's cases like this where manually packing might be a better idea. I know I manually packed all of the accessory UVs. Case was probably more of a waste of time. But in cases like this where you need to, you know, match the textil density, and there's a lot of parts you need to fit into one island and maybe you don't have any other option. Like if you're hitting the limit of your budget, and, you know, whoever's in charge of all of the technical budgets and optimizations is telling you, you know, you can't have another texture, then, you're probably going to have to pack your UVs manually just to make sure that you can squeeze every last bit out of them. You're still well within budgets, then, you know, go ahead and auto pack things. And if it roughly matches the textile density of the up parts, then that's great. If it doesn't match, then maybe you will want to reorganize some of your materials. Maybe you'll move some islands over from one material to another. That's always possible. I could do this here, but I didn't really want to because I already finished the UVs for the other parts. So I would much prefer to just finish this one up, and then I wouldn't have to repack the other UVs and rebake them. That would be really annoying if I had to do that. And I think it would annoy you guys as well, too, because you don't want to watch me do the UVs twice. So yeah, I'm going to try and fit all of these into one square and hopefully have it be a decent resolution compared to everything else. So I'm just cleaning up this main arm island. Now, both the top and the bottom sides of this are very wavy and curved. So, you know, it's kind of tricky. You're not going to get this into a nice rectangle, but what I can do is straighten out both ends so that those can be lined up nicely. And I can also sort of make sure that both the peaks on the top and the bottom side sort of line up because there's two protruding parts up there. So if I line them up horizontally, that still makes this island a little bit easier to pack in with other objects than if I just left it the way it was where, you know, every single part is a different height. If you line up protruding parts more or less, just like I'm doing with this one, I'm trying to at least have all of the top parts be at the same height. That makes it a little bit easier to line up with things with other islands in the UV maps. So, um, yeah, when you're trying to straighten these very irregularly shaped objects that, you know, they don't have any straight sides that you can just have flat, at the very least, try and have the protruding parts be even, so you don't have one that's sticking out a lot more than the others because that's going to be much harder to line up than something that, you know, has all of the peaks lined up in one row. Because when they're in one row, then, you know, you can sort of squeeze them up against something, and the space loss is minimal. But when there's one of them that's protruding, then you have to squeeze it in at an angle or something like that. And, you know, that's just way more space wasted. So something like this is much better. And hopefully, once I straighten all of these islands out and make them a little bit easier to pack around, I'll be able to hopefully get closer to packing all of these into that one square that I have to. If this doesn't work out, then, you know, I'll have to try something else. I might have to, you know, redo one of the other UV apps. But I'm hoping it doesn't come to that. At the very least once everything's straightened out, you know, moving some stuff around between one material and another, it doesn't take too long, and sometimes it is something that you have to do. So don't be like super set on how you're going to have your UVs or material split up. Sometimes just for the sake of keeping a consistent textil density, you are going to have to redo these things and yeah. So for example, maybe I would take a couple parts from the accessories or take maybe one of the smaller parts from the body and add them to the mechanical arm just so I can have things a little bit more even. I already added, like, the sleeve here to the mechanical arm UVs. Now, the idea behind the materials, the way I split up the materials was that I was going to have all of just the hard surface objects in this UV in this material. But, you know, I had to add these sleeves just because I had that leftover space, right? Because otherwise, the textile density here was just going to be way too high, you know, compared to all of the other things that have way more objects in them. So I decided, you know, I'm going to add the sleeves into this one as opposed to adding them to the body or to the accessories, those islands already those materials are already packed with UV islands. So yeah. The sleeves are probably going to be able to share the same material because there's not going to be anything crazy going on for the hard surface part. It's just going to be a regular old PBR material with metalness value applied to it. So the sleeves should be able to share it. And if I do decide to add some more fabric shading properties to the sleeves in terms of materials, then you can easily just have two materials that share the same textures. That's a very common trick when you're trying to save on draw calls and not have too many different textures. For an object. So you have two materials with different shaded properties. So one might have subsurface scattering and maybe the other one has some sort of I don't know, a frenel effect or something like that. And then both of them use the same textures, and they only use, you know, the part of the texture that they need. And actually, things can get a lot more complicated than that, if you take a look at the character assets for Epic Games is Paragon. They've actually put up all of the files that you can download from the Epic Games store for free. That's a great place if you want to check out, you know, how they've done their character assets. Although I will say that it is maybe slightly different than the most common workflow for characters. I think it is still more common to have unique textures than the very complicated master material setup they used, but it is something that's quite interesting still, the way they pretty much use just tiling textures and then masks to give every single object a little bit of uniqueness. It's something you can definitely check out if you're interested in maybe the more tech side of things. And in general, it's cool to be able to download and check out, you know, characters from a game that aren't just ripped out because of course, model rips, they don't have any of the original shade or information or anything like that. But those assets that Epic has provided, you know, you can see how they've set up the materials and all of that. And while their skin shaders and the hair shaders are maybe a little bit dated now, they're still a good start if you want to check out how they've done those things. They're still pretty good. So that's another thing you can do. And in general, I would advise checking out all of the Mata humans and the photorealistic character stuff Epic games has put out. They tend to make a lot of these files available for free, and, you know, it's a great way to check out, you know, all of the different tech and how they've put together the characters. There's really no other place that releases that stuff as much and as often. So the Meta humans right now are a great place to sort of borrow materials from if you want a skin shader for your personal projects. Of course, this all pertains to Unreal engine because I'm using Mama Z toolbg. You can't transfer materials over from Unreal to Mamaset. You can sort of take a look at how they're built and try and replicate that, but it's a very different process in Mom Z toolbag. So maybe this isn't entirely relevant. But I would advise, you know, downloading Unreal Engine and checking out all of the assets that they have available for free, provided by Epic. It's a great learning resource. Now, moving on to trying to figure out how to fit all of these into one square, you know, I'm going to try my best to get these all in there. They seem like they might fit. You know, it's pretty close. There might be some stuff that I can scale down maybe a tiny bit, stuff that isn't as visible. I'm just trying to fit these main objects in there for now, and then all of the objects that I've left off to the side, they're a little bit less important, so I can squeeze them in a little bit later once I have these main things figured out. Now it would probably be a little bit easier to fit all these things together if I broke up all my materials into smaller parts. And there's no reason you can't do that. A lot of different there's a lot of different ways you can handle breaking up your object into materials. You'll find games where the materials are broken up a lot. So you'll have a separate material for every article 0F clothing. And that's especially more common when you can swap out the clothing and customize your character, then every customized part will have its own texture, usually, or even multiple textures sometimes. There's really a lot of different ways to do other games will lump up the textures more together with each other. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways you can handle it. If it is a struggle to fit all of these things into one texture, you can easily break things up more. So if I broke up the body into pants texture, and then the vest and top of the body texture, and then maybe I can break up the accessories into two different parts. And then these parts, I could also break up a little bit more. That's entirely viable, and there's no reason you can't do that. I find is a little bit easier to texture when things are in bigger texture sheets just because, you know, everything's in one place, and it's less work. So in my personal projects, I do have a tendency to have more stuff in a single material. But having three or four textures main textures, I mean, for a character is perfectly normal. There's going to be some bonus material sets here as well. No bonus, but just some extra ones. So the weapons have their own material. Of course, the skin has its own material. The eyes have a couple of materials to them, but, you know, the eyes are quite small, so the textures there aren't huge, and, you know, the ambient for the eyes, Uh, I'll explain a little bit right now while there's nothing too interesting going on on screen here. But I'll be getting to the eyes separately. There's a reason why I haven't talked about doing their Rtopo or UVs at all. And that's because I find it I think it's probably best if I cover all of that in one go when it comes to the eyes because those things are very intertwined, and there's a lot of messes or not a lot of messures, but there's a couple of messures to the eyes that won't really make sense by themselves. There's a little ambient occlusion shell that goes over the eye and then the telline shell, and it's best if I just show me making those at the same time as the material because they're also the type of thing that you'll want to check on as you're modeling in Mum's toolbg if they look correctly. I usually handle the eyes after I've done at least blocked in the skin material, and that's why I haven't shown you anything regarding the eyes yet. So um yeah, but there's, like, at least three materials that make up the eyeballs, but they all use quite small textures, and they're very simple. And then, you know, the hair might be one or two texture sheets. And I think that's going to be about it for this character. So yeah, but you can easily break up a character into more textures. If you want to, you don't need to just stick with the four main ones I have here. If you feel like, you know, it's too much of a hassle to fit these things into one tech sheet, by all means, you know, split things up a little bit more because that's also done. It's really, you know, when you're working on your own stuff, it's a little bit up to personal preference. Iva is fine. When you're working on an actual project, then it depends on, you know, whatever the tech guys tell you is the best way to handle it. So I've pretty much managed to fit in all of the larger EV islands and all of the rectangular ones. So it's just a few left, and most of these are actually the backs of objects where I don't need that much resolution, so I'll be able to scale some of these down. These are still the front of those two little pads or panels that go in front of the elbow, front and behind of the elbow, and so is this one. So I can't do anything with the scale of these. But all of the other ones, like the backside of the cauldron, I don't need it to be that big. And the backside of those two panels as well. I don't need them to be that big either. So I can scale those down and fit them in wherever I need. These round ones are also quite easy to fit in because they're not too big. So I'm just going to scale them down and squeeze them in wherever I can. And it looks like I've managed to get everything to fit into this UV square. So that's pretty good result. The textil density across all of these is more or less even. They're slightly bigger on this UV island, but it's not enough to make a major impact. So that's going to be completely fine. And yeah, I'm getting pretty close to being able to go ahead and give this a bake and see how it goes. I just noticed a few holes or vertices that came apart on the portum there, so I welded those back up, and I'm just shifting stuff around because there's a few things. You know, while I'm still just trying to fit stuff together, I won't worry about, you know, padding and making sure that nothing is touching each other. Uh, you know, I'll just roughly fit stuff in. As long as I can tell that it's more or less fitting together, then I can go ahead with that and clean it up later, especially if there's some stuff that's barely touching. If I really need to, I can go ahead and use peel mode or just the soft select tools to maybe shift the corners of a UV island around to get them to fit. In this case, I don't really have to do that, but that's also an option. You know, you don't have to just straighten your UVs out and stick with them. If you can just barely fit something in, but not quite, you can go ahead and maybe move the corner a little bit or shift something around in order to get it to fit. Now I'm checking out how it looks in terms of textile density and how it compares to the other parts. And I can see that the chest is definitely lacking, and that's more to do with the way the chest part is unwrapped than with, you know, the actual scale of the EV island because of course, that boob is very spherical and it's been flattened down into a flat shape. So in order to compensate for that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to, um shift around the inside of the UV island a little bit. I'm going to push the, you know, middle of the chest area outwards, and hopefully that's going to compensate for the lack of, you know, resolution in the middle there, because it's really not as much of an issue of the scale of a UV island, just the fact that it's not very even in terms of resolution within itself, right? The middle part is squashed inwards just because it's a spherical object getting flattened down. So I'm going to sort of use the peel tools to stretch around the border of it. And hopefully that will compensate for the lower resolution inside. And yeah, hopefully get me closer to my intended textile density. So I'm just using the peel tool to pin the edges of the middle of the chest and drag them out to the sides. So it's looking a lot closer to what the body has. You know, it's in the same ballpark now, so this is probably going to be acceptable. Like I said, it doesn't have to be spot on in terms of textil density, has to be roughly similar. And this seems close enough for me. So I'm going to go with this. I would say that maybe, you know, it would benefit splitting up the materials into smaller chunks. Maybe it would have been better to split the pants and the vest off, but, you know, at this point, I'm already pretty far into the process, and I've baked those parts, and I've done the final UVs, so I'm probably not going to backtrack and redo them. Because this is good enough, either way. If you keep backtracking and redoing parts that aren't quite perfect, you know, it'll take so long to finish a single project, as long as something is good enough to have a decent result. I feel like it's much better to just take the lessons that you've learned and apply them to your next project instead of tirelessly, you know, rework the same thing over and over again, because, like, the more you rework something, the more issues you're going to find further back in the process. So, you know, by the time you've redone all of the UVs perfectly, you're going to start looking at the sculpt and thinking, you know, maybe I could have done this better now and then, you know, you might start wanting to rework the sculpt. Then you'll have to rework the UVs and you'll be spending six months on the same project, where instead, you could have taken those lessons you learned and applied them to your next projects. And in the same time frame, you would have two completed projects. Maybe the first one isn't quite perfect, but the second one has taken all of the lessons you learned from the first one and applied them, so it's much better as opposed to, polishing the same one over and over, and it's still probably not going to be as good as if you just started a new project because all of the things you've learned across, you know, doing one project, um, either you have to redo everything twice, or you have some areas where there are shortcomings where you haven't been able to apply the things you learned because, you know, they're still old assets from before you learnt those things. So yeah, that's why I say, don't be too much of a perfectionist when it comes to these things. It's better to have a larger body of work. You know, I'm not going to say quantity over quality, but at the end of the day, you need to make some amount of quantity of projects and assets in order to build up that experience. As opposed to putting all of your work into just one asset and hoping, you know, you have one perfect asset. At the end of the day, it's better to have, you know, three or four imperfect assets and then work your way up to that perfect one instead of trying to get it all right the first time around, I feel. So now I'm working on these screws and bolts that were left over, and I didn't work on them together with the rest of the UVs. I think my original intent was to just unwrap one of them and then duplicate it around. But these cylindrical objects don't take too long to weld up, so I'm just going to do these individually because I can't really be bothered to, you know, duplicate them around and then reposition them. So it's just going to be quicker if I just use a quick peel on all of them, and they'll be done. When you have seams on your object, the way I clear seams very quickly is just use the peel tool on them and then hit them with a quick peel and that fixes them. Like so. So it's very quick. And this is probably faster than if I, you know, unwrapped one of them and then went around and repositioned all the copies. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to split off the side, and I'm going to flatten out the side like a long thin rectangle instead of leaving it splayed out like this. In this case, I think Ivor option is fine. You can leave them the way they are. And this is too big of a deal. Of course, there is some distortion around the outer edge where the outermost sides are stretched out a lot, just because, you know, you're taking a cylinder and you're splaying out into a circle. Of course, the taller the cylindrical object, the less viable that is when it's something that's not very tall, then, you know, it's completely fine to squash it down into a circle. As a cylinder gets taller, you, you know, you want to split off the side and turn it into a rectangle more and more. In this case, because the sides are less visible. I thought I might as well split them off and have them as rectangles instead of having them take up a lot of resolution by just having them splayed out the way they were. Uh, but you could easily go with the other option as well and save yourself the trouble of doing this. Both would work fine in this situation. I just went with this one. So I'm going to finish up straightening these parts out for all of the bolts, and then I'm going to have to normalize the scale of them, so they're all matching the scale of each other. And I tried to get them to normalize to the scale of the other objects, but that didn't quite work. So I just ended up scaling them down to the same textal density as everything else manually, unfortunately. So I'm just scaling them down. And I'm roughly eyeballing how big they need to be. On a tiny part like this, it's sometimes okay to have these scaled up a little bit bigger, just so, you know, the very small details on them actually bake down properly. So if you have a very small part and it's just too low 61. 21 Final Topo Fix And Baking The Arms: This is Chapter 21 of UV mapping, and I'm continuing right where I left off in the last one. And I'm moving on to turning on X view so I can see any overlapping vertices, and that'll help me clean up the topology on this arm because there's quite a few things wrong with it. I was kind of messy when I was doing the retopo for this part. So there's a lot of vertices that are overlapping just from me being a little bit imprecise with the cut tool and stuff like that. Right now, I'm trying to apply a weld to the whole thing to hopefully weld up some of those overlapping vertices automatically, but it doesn't work on all of them. In fact, I think it only gets a few or none at all. So a lot of this is just going to have to be me manually going through and inspecting each one that gets highlighted green by XVew Uh, XO is really useful for this. And actually, it took me a really long time to realize that this was a tool and an option in three Yes Max. It's kind of hidden away behind that little plus sign at the top left of the viewport. And, you know, I had never really heard of it for a very long while. I was doing three D for quite a while until I realized that these tools were available and very useful for troubleshooting and doing your final pass on any sort of geometry you might have. So I'm just going through and welding up any point that might be green, and there's also going to be a bunch of engons that I'm going to have to take care of as well. Some of these points are a little bit troublesome to figure out where the duplicated point is, or the World tool sometimes refuses to work, like with this vertex right here. So for some of them, I just had to delete the face that the vertex was attached to and then try again once that face was deleted. It's a little bit unusual, but as things happen. Sometimes the World tool doesn't like to work when you're in the middle of a face and there's an edge connecting those two parts. So be aware of that. If a vertex is being very stubborn and the World tool just isn't working on it, you may just have to delete that face. Be aware that when you delete a face and then bring it back with the CAP tool, it will be somewhat messed up in the UVs, so you'll definitely have to go back to the UV editor and fix it up. Um usually things like this, these minor edits aren't too big of a deal. You'll just have a face that you'll have to fit back into the surrounding geometry in the UV view. It's not too bad of a fix, but this is why I mentioned in the last chapter that maybe it's a better idea to do this before you clean up the UVs. I'm working a little bit out of order here. Maybe not setting the best example, but, you know, we're not all perfect, are we? I'm adding an extra edge in here because I felt like it was somewhat lacking. I could definitely use an extra edge there especially because this is the armpit area, so there is going to be a fair amount of defamation here. So I may as well add those extra edges to make sure that I can support all of it. And that's why I'm also going to add an edge here just because if I take a look at the high poly, you can see that the original geometry wasn't supporting that curve that's down there or that bulge at all. The low poly was just cutting right through it underneath the surface. And that probably wouldn't bake ideally. And also, this is the armpit, so it's an area with a lot of deformation. So any extra geometry in this area definitely can't hurt. In order to support that deformation. So I just need to clean up some of these edges or vertices that are added. I'm going to weld these two together just because higher up on the shoulder, there's quite a big step between the shoulder and the body. But down here, those two panels sort of come in line with each other and there's no longer very significant step between them. So in this area, I can weld those two edges together. I don't need to define that step in the low poly anymore. You can see that the UVs are getting pretty messed up in some areas where I'm changing the geometry, adding faces or adding in cuts and welding stuff together. Generally, just cutting faces up won't affect the UVs too much. But once you start welding corners to each other, or if you delete a face and then add a new one, that's when that starts to affect the UVs pretty severely. But as long as these changes are sort of localized to one polygon, they're still very easy to fix. You can just see usually, you'll see that, you know, there's just one polygon in that area that is stretched out across the entire UV map or something like that, and it's very easy to just pick up those vertices and drag them back into the position they're supposed to be. So I've moved on to working on the top part of the arm just under the armpit here. There's some stuff that looks like it doesn't quite line up with the hi poly here. And I think I can use a few extra edges to the very top of the curved part of this arm panel. So I'm just going in with the drag tool and making sure everything's in the right spot. And I'm going to add an extra edge along here. As you can see that this area is quite round, but on the low polly, it wasn't coming across as quite round enough for me. So I'm just adding in these few extra edges to really make that work on the low poly. And, yeah, it is a bit of fiddling around. Of course, it would have been ideal to do this before I did the UVs, but, you know, I kind of forgot and I kind of didn't really notice that this stuff still needed fixing. But that's okay. You know, it's no big deal. Just fixing this stuff later on in the UVs is going to be very easy, especially now since I know that everything fits into this UV island. There's not going to be any major changes that I'll need to make. So I'm just going around and making sure that a lot of these edges are lined up with the panel lines on the body because that's pretty important if you've placed panel seams UV seams along panel lines on the body, you want them to be lined up pretty well. Now I'm going to go ahead and fix those faces that were messed up when I have welded them or deleted them and remade them. You can see that these have become attached to another UV island, but it's very easy to identify the issue and sort of pull stuff back to where it's meant to be. So like I said, it's not a big deal to make these minor adjustments to the UV map if you do feel like you need to adjust some of the geometry. But I will say that it's definitely best to do all of this stuff before you start texturing. Because while there is an option to reimport your low poly in substance painter, and it will try to preserve the strokes and all of the work that you've done on the low poly so far, I've found that it's not always reliable. Sometimes it will mess up all of your brush strokes and all of your masks if you reimport a model, it depends on what you've done to it. If it's minor changes, usually, it's okay, but sometimes the brush strokes will just get offset and put in the wrong position. So it's not something you really want to do. It's best to get all of your UVs giometry right before you head into substance painter. Now I'm going to go ahead and export this out and give it a test bake in marmosett just to see where I'm at before I finish up the rest of the cleanup of the low poly. So I'm just dragging stuff into the baking groups now. I'm not setting up individual baking groups just yet. I'm just going to bake everything in one and see how it turns out, just to get a general gist of the quality of the current bake. So here is the baked normal map. It's looking fairly good. It's actually better than I expected aside from the stuff getting baked onto other objects. It looks pretty close to the high poly, actually, and there aren't too many issues in a lot of these areas aside from clipping, everything's turning out pretty clean. So I'm happy with this, and I'm going to go ahead with carrying on to clean up all of this stuff. So I'm going to split stuff up into baking groups now. The inside of this bolt seemed to have flipped normals. So I'm going to have to go ahead and fix that, as well. But for now, I'm going to detach them so they don't get baked onto other objects. And pretty much do exactly what I did for the accessories where, you know, I broke up all of the objects into baking ribs that didn't come into contact with each other to sort of get rid of all the clipping issues. So I fix the normals on the bolts here, and I'm just going to give them the smoothing group treatment with text tools. And you can see sometimes use the clay view on under the right most drop down menu at the top of the viewport. There is a clay view, which basically sets up a mat cap for all of your objects, and, you know, it gets rid of all the textures and stuff and just gives you a clay view. Which can be useful if you have textures that make it hard to see what's going on, or if you just want to see what your object looks like in a bit of a different light, anyways, it gives you a bit of a different look to the regular viewports. So sometimes it's useful if you want to check the shape of an object or such. So occasionally, I'll switch into the clay view. Just carrying on splitting stuff up into groups. And I'm just doing this for the low poly now, and I'll do the hi poly later. It's a little bit easier on the arm because it's easier to keep track of all the different parts when it's just an arm as opposed to the accessories, which was a bunch of disjointed little objects. Here, it's just, you know, one arm, so it's quite easy to keep track of all of the different high poly and low poly objects. It's not quite as confusing as the previous part I worked on. Now, I just tried to use turn to poly on those end caps of these arm parts, but it didn't give a good result, so I'm going to have to go ahead and clean them up manually. So I'm just going to cut all this stuff up into quads, so triangles, very straightforward, very simple. Nothing fancy here. It's always a good bet to try turn to poly and set the max polygon value at four. And when you're doing these, just in case it gives a good enough result to where you don't need to clean anything up. In this case, it didn't give me a good result. So I had to go ahead and clean stuff up manually, but in some cases, it will. So it's worth giving it a try because it only takes a second and seeing what result it might give. And then if it's not an acceptable result, just delete the modifier and do it yourself. I'm just getting rid of all of the triangles on those very end bits, and that's that part done. I'm just going to have to use the selection menu to select all of the polygons greater than four sided and go through and clean them all up. You've seen me do this before when I was doing the re topo and cleaning up some of the other parts. So nothing new here. It's a bit of a tedious process, but it's something you need to do to avoid those little issues with, you know, messed up vertex normals on your bake, slightly messing up the shadows. And, in general, you know, you need to keep your models clean, so they look nice. So for the tops of these little bolts, you know, they're just like octagons or decagons or something like that. I tend to bridge in a sort of horizontal pattern or vertical. It doesn't matter, but I bridge it into quads instead of collapsing everything down into a single point. That tends to work a little bit better. Collapsing stuff down into a single point is a little bit faster. It's less work. Uh, so it's something I will do for hidden parts like end caps. But if you bridge it into quads, it does tend to bake a little bit better because like I've said, having long thin triangles sometimes shows up in your bake. You can sort of see it. It doesn't work great. So for visible areas where you have, you know, the tops of cylinders and stuff like that, I would suggest bridging it into quads like I did there, just a bunch of rectangles instead of collapsing all those edges into a single point. I think it works a little bit better, and in general, that's what I've seen most people do. So I'm really just going around the entire model and cutting up any engons that I see, just cleaning stuff up in general. Very straightforward, right? It's a lot easier than modeling. I'm just tidying stuff up here. So, you know, using the selection panel, selecting quads that are greater than four sides, which lets me see where I need to clean stuff up. I just going through the entire model and doing that. So I'm going to spend, you know, ten more minutes or so doing this, making sure that everything is tidy, and then I'll move on to doing the final bike for this part. So you can see for this object, there are quite a few faces highlighted, so it's going to be quite a bit of work up here. But it's usually quite simple areas. It's just stuff that I've left these corners, where have added extra geometry to support that rounded corner. It's just stuff like this that's left over. So it's not a big deal to fix these things. It's not like complex problems I've left for myself to solve. It's really mostly a matter of just bridging up engons. Around this corner, I did have a little bit of a think, and I tried a few different things because you can see that there's sort of an edge I can add there that's close to another one. So I was thinking about whether to collapse these down into one, like you can see right now or to leave them separate because it was sort of a borderline case where uh, collapsing them down did somewhat affect the silhouette negatively, but leaving it there also didn't feel quite right because there were two edges that were very close to each other. But at the end of the day, I chose to preserve the silhouette instead of go for too much efficiency. So that's what I ended up sticking with. Just going through, you know, finding all of these angons and cleaning them. Oh, another thing you can use is turn to poly and remove mid edge vertices. That's very useful for when you have a bunch of vertices in the middle of your edges, that will just get rid of them in one fell swoop. You won't have to do each one individually, so that's great. And going through, I mean, these areas are very easy, right? It's just bridging stuff up and cutting it apart. Yeah. So a little bit more to go. Going to weld some of these edges up as well. And over here, I'm going to cut these up. In some cases, you may just want to add geometry in a few areas, which I've done a couple of times over this process, where I feel like instead of just cutting stuff up and getting rid of engons, it may be better to just extend an edge loop through where, you know, the savings don't seem to justify you know, affecting the silhouette too much or something like that. Cleaning up these end caps again, same thing you saw me do on the bottom half of this. For the most part, I'm just bridging side to side to make quads, and then towards the end that rounded part, I will just cut up into, you know, like a pizza into a bunch of triangles. And this whole area is hidden, so I'm not too concerned about it. It's just a cap there to stop light leaking through and, you know, stop odd cavities showing up when I'm rendering. When I texture this, I'll just set it to have a dark albedo and a very strong ambient occlusion map so that it just looks like a shadow. It's not something that I intend to have visible. It's purely there to block out light and stop odd cavities from showing up. So cutting up these little corners here. And back to this area, again, I wasn't sure how to handle this to leave that extra little vertex there or to merge it to the nearest point. I think in the end, I decided to leave it there because merging it down just affected the silhouette a little bit too much. It didn't look great when I merged it down. You can see that if you have the turn to polymodifier visible, you will actually see which edges it's going to add to get rid of engons. They'll be highlighted in red. And as you add more edges, it will get updated and show you what else it needs to do. So this can be one way to work to have the visibility of the turn to polymodifier turned on above your edit polymodifier, as you continue to get rid of some engons in areas where you feel like the turn to polymodifier isn't doing a great job. But this can get in the way sometimes. If there's a lot of stuff you're not happy with turn to poly doing, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to see what you're doing when you have a bunch of edges highlighted by the turn to poly modifier. So I tend to turn it on and off again depending on, you know, the exact area I'm working on and if it's getting in the way of my visibility and the ability for me to see what I'm doing. So I'm getting pretty close to being done here. All of this stuff is more or less finished. I'm going to take a look at the UVs now to fix any areas that I've messed up while editing the geometry because there's bound to be a few. The relax brush will help you relax any UVs that might be squashed up, but sometimes it relaxes stuff too much or doesn't quite relax in the correct direction in relation to the three D model. So sometimes it's easier to just do it by hand. And I'm turning on distortion view because you'll be very easily able to pick out areas that are, you know, messed up. Just by looking at distortion view, you'll have, you know, massive blue or red polygons wherever you've distorted something by editing the geometry. So back to this, the chest, you can see that it's looking a lot better now. It's only slightly pink in the middle where the textil density is a bit lower, whereas before it was much lower in the middle. So that's definitely an improvement. And I think there's a duplicated vertex somewhere around here, just based on how it's shading. But it could just be a normal error, so I'm going to unify the normals and check again. And I think that fixed it, so it's just a normals issue. So with that fixed, I'm ready to export my low poly. So I'm going to go ahead and name this correctly like everything else and then select everything and export it out. Making sure to triangulate when I export. Now in Mom Z toolbg, I'm going to set up a baking group for each low poly object. And I'll also drag the sleeves high poly object into the correct baking group. But for the rest of the high poly, I'll move into three DS Max and split up the baking groups like I did for the accessories. So back in three DS Max now, I'm going to follow the same setup I did for the accessories. So I'll have the high poly objects in transparent mode, and I'll make the low poly objects very bright red, so I can see exactly what I need to select. And I'm just going to make a new layer for every selection. So one baking group is going to be for the bolts or the screws. And making sure that everything is included in that baking group. I'm going to have to detach these two from the high poly and put them in the baking group and that's that one done. I can move on to the next one, make a new layer, and start selecting all the things I need to add to that layer. So just going by visibility, of course, this would be a little bit easier if I had every single high poly object named correctly, but it's a little bit tedious to name things when you have hundreds of them. So sometimes, you know, it's faster to just click things on and off with visibility as opposed to coming up with 100 names for 100 different parts. You know, this might be a little bit messy, but, you know, for personal project, it's okay. When you're working on a team, you probably need to try a little bit harder to name your objects. But when I'm just by myself, this is absolutely fine. And I'm just going through. This is very quick when it comes to the arm because there aren't that many objects here, so it's not too hard to figure out what needs to be put into each baking group. So just working on the last one, figuring out everything that belongs to it. And I just need to name it, and it'll be done, and I'll be able to start exporting. But So I just want to get these two little panels on the forearm into the correct baking group because I didn't quite get them right the first time around. And now I should be good to go. I just going to name this baking group correctly and go ahead and start exporting these. So I'm just selecting all the parts that belong to the layers, making a folder for all of these high poly objects. So that, you know, I don't have to sort through all of the other high poly objects just to get to these. And I'm making sure not to triangulate when I export because for very high polyobjects, I've mentioned this before, but triangulating just adds another step to the export, and it takes a little bit longer, I've found, at least, so when it comes to these very high poly objects, it already takes a long time to export, so you don't want to be doing any additional steps to make that even longer. So just going to go through all of the remaining hi poly baking groups, and this will be nice and ready to do the final bake in Mama's tool bag. So there we go. That's all of them. Now I can go ahead and import all of these, get rid of the original hi poly. And with them imported, I just have to match them to their low polies. And I've skipped ahead in the recording to where I've already put everything into the baking groups it's supposed to be to save you the time. And I've done a quick bake to see where I'm at with this. And I'm actually really happy with the result. It's looking better than I expected. There's really not any issues with it. Aside from one, which I'll point out in a moment. So if I take a look here at this little inset part, you can see that the bottom corner of it has sort of a skewed edge that isn't there on the high poly. And while it's not too bad from a distance, it's definitely visible. So it's something I want to correct. The first thing I'm going to try is just adjusting the baking cage offset. So sometimes if the offset is too high, it can create skewing just because of the angles from which it's projecting. So by adjusting it downwards, I can sometimes alleviate or completely remove these issues. It looks like it's helped a little bit, but it still hasn't fixed it. I'm also baking out an ambient occlusion map because those sometimes help you see issues a little bit better. So I'm just going to plug that into the ambient occlusion slot now. And the issue is still visible in both the normal and the ambient occlusion map. So I'm going to try and paint the offset down a little bit more around the edges of these insets again. And hopefully that will improve the issue, but it's probably not going to resolve it. As we can see, if I rebake the issue is still there. So the next thing I'm going to try is painting the skew. So below the paint offset bun, there is a paint skew bun. And basically, if you paint with a darker value around any areas that are skewed, it will try and fix the skewing in that area and straighten it out. So that's what I'm doing painting over that little corner that's skewed inwards. And that definitely looks like it has improved the issue. It's looking a little bit straighter than it was before, at least in this preview. So I'm going to mess around with it a little bit more and then see how it looks. Just play around with the different gray values and see, you know, how that affects the result and the bake and see if that is fixing it or making it worse because the skew tool isn't always perfect. It can't fix everything, but it can help a lot in some areas. So it's looking a little bit better, but it's still kind of jagged and not perfectly straight. From a distance, I would say it's fine, and I would be tempted to leave that as it is, but I do want to show you guys how to completely fix issues like this. So the first thing I'm going to try is detaching these two inset areas from the rest of the UV island. And what this will do is it will also put a seam on the baking cage when I'm baking, and because of that seam there it will slightly project from a slightly different angle when I bake. So that different angle might help with the skewing. So this is something you can try if you have a lot of very severe skewing on an object and you can't paint it out with the skew painting tool in Moms Tool Bank. You may want to try breaking the object up into more UV islands, and that can often help with the issue. Now I need to clear the old skew painted mask. And see if that's helped at all. Now, it doesn't really look like it has, so it's a little bit unfortunate, and I'm probably going to have to try something else. But before I do that, I will try painting the skews again a little bit. So I'm just going to paint some dark values around the problem area and see how this affects the result. It looks like it's improving quite a bit. In fact, most of the skew is more or less gone there now. So I'm working on the other edges a little bit as well, just to see if I can make those even better. So once I'm done with painting these skews again, I'll go ahead and bake once more. And this is looking fairly good. I want to increase the bake settings as well, so I'll add a soften value and increase the samples to 16 and try baking again. And I'll increase the resolution to four K as well. And it's looking okay, but I feel like there's still some unevenness around the sides, and I'm just going to go back to the low poly and reconnect these islands back to the main UV islands. So I'll just delete the unwrapped UV modifier that I just added because I didn't quite like those being separated out. I would prefer these to be in the same island so I can paint across these areas and maybe paint in a little bit of a ambient occlusion around the edges here in substance painter. So I don't want to separate these out into separate islands after all. Instead, what I'm going to try is slightly change up the flow of the topology because another issue that might be causing the skewing here is all of the edges that go diagonally across this UV island. So by straightening them out and sort of having them be let's say, it's not parallel, but the opposite of parallel to the sides of the inset rectangle. So if I have the edges going straight across the sides of the rectangle, it should reduce the amount of skewing that I'm seeing. The other issue I'm seeing a little bit here is some of the edges are quite uneven, like the shampot goes around the edge. So I'm going to try and even that out a little bit too. All of these issues can contribute to edges looking uneven or being slightly skewed. So I'm just going to go through and put a little bit of care and attention towards all of the vertices in this area and try and make things a little bit more even along the edges. So I want to make sure that the hampers around the edge are an even width all the way around, and that the bottom edges around the sides of the indent are also sort of even and don't get thinner towards the middle and then wider towards the end. In general, I just want things to, you know, straighten out a little bit. And hopefully that will resolve a lot of skewing issues that I'm seeing. You can see that these two vertices weren't quite on the edge of the sort of indented panel. So they were inwards a little bit compared to either end. And that can contribute to what I saw in the bake, that sort of unevenness around the edges. And that's what I'm trying to resolve here. I'm trying to make sure that everything is following the lines of the high poly pretty much and not inconsistent anymore. Um, I would say, though, that the last result I got was pretty much good enough to use, I would say, aside from the fact that I didn't want these UV islands to be separate. So I didn't want these intended parts to be on a separate UV island because I think it would make dextering them a little bit harder in substance painter. Otherwise, I would have kept that result. But yeah, like I said, I want these UV islands to be together. So I'm going to go back and try adjusting the low poly here and see if I can get a similar or better result just by having slightly better topology in this area or not even topology, but just by positioning the vertices slightly more evenly in this area. I'm going to check out the UV map to make sure that none of the changes I've made to the topology here have messed it up too badly. You saw that one of these vertices got moved off to the side a little bit. So I'm just making sure that all of these are in the right place on the UV map, after I've made my adjustment, after I've made my adjustments, and once that's looking close enough, I'll go ahead and re export it. And see how this has affected the bake. So it's looking a little bit better now. I'm just going to go ahead and reset the skew map and try baking again. And this is a much better initial result than before. So I'm going to go ahead and try painting the skews a little bit once more with this new result to see if I can pretty much get things perfect this time around. Because if the initial result without painting any skews was already better, then I'm guessing that with a little bit of painting, I can get it to be pretty much perfect. So that's what I'm going for now. Just trying to even things out a little bit more. You can see that I'm getting pretty close to being spot on here. Actually, I think this looks good enough now. So I'm going to go ahead and bake this and see how a proper bake looks. So it's definitely holding up now, so I'm happy with that. And I'm going to move on to checking out the rest of all of the low polypts and seeing if I see any issues, and I really don't, so that's great. It looks like there's something a little bit weird going on underneath the pauldron, but that's actually just the contact shadows from the ambient occlusion map. So that's not really an issue. If I just bake an ambient occlusion that respects baking groups, then you can see that that looks absolutely fine. So it looks like there's no issues with this bake, and I can move on to baking out all of the rest of the maps here. So the first thing I'll try is baking out the material ID map just to check that I have a separate material ID for every single element of the high poly. So I'm going to go ahead and set that up. Just tick material ID here and hit Bake again. And I'll apply this to my Albedo map channel on the material that's supplied to the low poly. And I can see that this is looking good. There's a different color applied to every single element of the high poly. So that's going to be great for masking out all of the different materials I have. And I'm just going to select all of the other maps I want to bake, same as usual. And I'm going to set up the baking settings. So samples to 16, most importantly, a little bit of softness and baking at four K. That's my usual setup. And, yeah, that's going to be this part completely baked. It looks great, so I'm happy with this. And in the next chapter, I'm going to move on to cleaning the baking cage offsets for the accessories object or material because I forgot to do that earlier, so I need to backtrack and do that and then do the setup of the final low poly model. So I'm just going to assemble all of the different parts of the low poly into one file that I can continue using for painting and all the rest of the stuff. So thanks for watching. That's all for this chapter. 62. 22 Finishing The Accesories And Assembling The Lowpoly: Hello, and welcome to Chapter 22 of UV mapping and baking. And this is actually going to be the last chapter of this whole process. So once this one's done, the low poly will be finished, and all of the UVs and baked textures will be done. So what I'm doing here is I'm going back to the accessories, and I'm painting all of the offsets of the baking cage, just cleaning up all of the baking areas when it comes to stuff, you know, either not quite reaching the high poly or clipping into another object. I just forgot to do this earlier when I was still working on the accessories. So I'm just backtracking a little bit and finishing this part up. Uh, so I've just got my low poly and I'm taking a closer look at it and checking out all of the problem areas. So I know what to look out for when I'm going to be painting this. So any part that looks messed up means I'm probably going to have to touch it a little bit with the offset painting tool. So I'll start with the belts right here. The first thing I need to do is figure out which baking group they belong to. And once I've found it, I can start painting the offsets. So to push the baking age up, you want to use a light value, of course, so something closer to white or a completely white. It depends on your max offset distance, how much you're going to how light a value you're going to need to apply, and also how far up the high poly is. Just make sure that everything is encompassed by the greenish baking cage you see right here. So those belts should be done now, and I can move on to a different area. Also, regularly do a little bake to see if the areas that you've painted up have worked or not, because the previews don't always show you exactly what you need to see, and also the previews are very low resolution compared to your actual baking resolution. So, you know, even though the previews are very useful, it's still best to do a proper bake every once in a while. So I've just turned off the material ID map from the albedo because it was getting a little bit annoying and making it a little bit tricky to see exactly what I needed to do in some areas. So I'm just going to work with a white albedo for now because it lets me see everything I need to do pretty easily. And anywhere where I see some spots of clipping, I just add a little spot of white to the offset map and I'm just using the three D viewpoint here mainly. Now, in some areas, you will find that you just can't paint the offset in such a way that it'll reduce all of the clipping. And that's just because the actual geometry is sufficient to bake that part. Because the offset map, all it does is it pushes the baking cage forwards. And in some cases, the baking cage is just facing such a direction that no matter how far you push it forwards, it's still not going to bake correctly. So in those cases, I am going to have to adjust the topology slightly. And for example, for the inside of the hood, that's definitely something I'm going to have to do. The inside of the hood is a little bit rough when it comes to the topology. So that's something I'll get to a little bit later. For now, I just want to see paint out as much as I can around this hood and maybe do a few other areas before I head back into three year Max. So the gloves look mostly fine, so that's all good. And the boots actually look pretty good as well. So I'm moving back to the hood, and I'm seeing if there's anything else I can just paint out here without editing the topology. There seems to be a little issue on the back of the hood here, and it doesn't seem I can paint it out. So that's something I'll have to check out in three S Max. And on the inside here, yeah, it's a real mess, and it doesn't look like I can paint those arrows out. So here I am back in three S MAX. And it's time to just move a few vertices around and add a few edges where I'm really lacking them. So I'll just add another edit poly so that I can always go back if I feel like I've messed up. And with my high poly visible, I'll try and adjust to the low poly a little bit here to make baking this a little bit easier. So part of it is going to be, you know, just adding a few edges in areas where there aren't enough edges to make a nice baking cage, and the other part is going to be moving some of these vertices around so that they better fit around the high poly. It's a bit of both. Of course, if I did simplify this area even more and just made it a little bit more plainer and didn't really bother getting into all of the folds as much, it would probably be a little bit easier to bake, but I kind of wanted to at least maintain the shape of the hi poly here. So it does look like a bunch of fabric scrunched up into the inside of the hood instead of just sort of plain giving a rough impression of that. I did want to maintain a little bit of that shape. So that makes it a little bit harder, but I think it'll look a little bit better as well. I'm also checking back to the actual baking scene in Momset to see where the worst issues were. So remember to check with your actual bake scene and find the problem areas there instead of rushing in blindly and also reference the actual high poly underneath your low poly to make sure that, you know, you're following the silhouettes of that, and just mess around a bit, add a few extra vertices, move some stuff around until it starts working really. So I'm almost done messing around here, so I'm going to export this and take a look at whether it's improving the situation or not in Mom Z Tool Bank. And I need to make sure that I am triangulating when I export. And here it is reimported and re baked. So a lot of the issues have been solved. There's only a few minor problem areas left now this little corner over here and another little corner over there. And aside from that, I think it's pretty good. So I'm back in the Max, and I'm going to try and fix these two remaining problem areas. So I'm just going to move a few of these vertices from these corners forwards, pretty much, and just make sure the angle in there is a little less sharp. It can be tricky to see what you're doing, especially when you have sharp angles like these. That's why I'm moving the camera around so much. It's a tricky area to see. Now, this is something you have to keep in mind when you're making your low poly. These very sharp angles in the low poly can be tricky to bake because the more you push the baking cage forwards, the more it starts to clip into another part of the high poly. When you have areas like this, you need to make sure that they are above the surface of the high poly. Otherwise, you know, because if they're below the surface, they're pushing the baking cage outwards ends up clipping it into another part of the low poly. So, you know, that doesn't fix your problem. You basically need to make sure that those areas are above the surface of the high poly. Otherwise, you won't be able to fix them, which is what I'm doing now. I'm just moving them upwards a bit and out of those very deep, sharp corners. And I'm regularly checking in with the marmosette scene to see what's going on there. And I'm going to re export and take a look if this has finally fixed the issue. And I'm making sure to click reload on the low poly just to make sure that you re imported. The patch on the right looks like it's been fixed, and now I'll give the one on the left to go. And this one doesn't look like it's working as well. Looks like it's still giving me a few problems, but I'm going to try and paint the offsets a little bit more, and it looks like it's getting quite close to being satisfactory over here. Like, this is probably acceptable, but I want to work with it a little bit more just to make sure it's perfect. So after giving it a proper bake, if I zoom out a little bit, it definitely looks pretty much fine, but you can see a little bit of Jagnus around the end there. So I am going to touch it up just a tiny bit more in three S Max here. So to fix that last remaining fold, I'm going to try cutting along with the bulge on the high poly where that cloth crumples over. And maybe this will help alleviate all of the baking cage issues I'm having. I accidentally made this vertex because I ended up cutting in both directions unintentionally. So I'm just going to weld this one back, although I did take a look and see if I could make use of it in the topology, but in the end, I decided that it was a little bit silly. So I've just cut diagonally across that bulge and moved one of those vertices upwards a little bit, and hopefully that'll just be enough to resolve that issue I was having in that corner. So I'm just going to bake again and this is the result I wanted to see. This whole area is looking pretty clean now. There's a few more spots that I'm going to clean up with the paint offset tool like this one. Sometimes you need to brush over the same area a few times just to get it to go away entirely. Now for the inside of the collar. Mam Z toolbag really makes solving these issues very easy. You can imagine how difficult it is to bake without these options to, you know, increase and decrease the cage distance wherever you like. You know, the workflow without Mazi Tolbag is either to have one value across your entire object. That's how it still works in substance painter. You don't really have too many options with the baking cage aside from setting one value for the whole thing and hoping it encompasses all of the objects you need. Or otherwise, you need to go and make a baking cage yourself manually. So that would be something like going into three years MAX, duplicating your low poly, adding the push modifier, and then you can, in some areas, you can decide to just manually move some vertices in or out a little bit more it would be basically the same as working with this baking cage, but instead of having a handy little brush where you can just brush on higher or lower values, you would have to be going in with all of the S Max editing tools and moving stuff around and also making sure not to change the topology in any way at all, because if your baking cage doesn't match the exact topology of your low poly, then it won't work. So that's the older workflow before Maze Tolbag came around with these excellent tools. And you can imagine, it's a little bit more frustrating and definitely a little bit more time consuming. So this really is the best way to bake out your maps. And with that, I'm going to check out all of the maps I've baked out, the ambient occlusion, the material ID, just make sure they all look good, and they do. So I'm going to call the baking on the accessories part completely done. And that sort of wraps out baking for the entire body. So right before I finish this chapter, I want to do one more thing, and that is sort of assemble all of the low poly objects in a new clean file so that I just have the low poly body and I can start using it for rigging and texturing substance painter. So that's what I'm going to do. So the first thing I've done is save this three S Max file as a completely new copy. So I'm keeping it separate from all of the old UV mapping files. So I can always go back to those if I ever need to adjust the UV map. All of those modifiers are still in their modifier stack in that old file, and this is a new one that is just going to include the low poly and what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean out all of the old high poly meshes that I don't need anymore and any leftover low poly stuff that maybe is a duplicate or, you know, just any meshes that didn't make the final cut that aren't part of the final model. There is also if you right click in the outliner, there is an option to remove empty layers. So I'm removing any of the empty layers that I'm not using anymore as well, because all they do is just clutter up your scene and make it harder to find the objects you want. And I'm also organizing all of the remaining final low poly objects into nice little layers, so I know where everything is. I'm going to attach all of these duplicated or parts that show you these with other lo poly objects together. So all of these belt loops and little bits like that. But one thing you need to watch out for when you attach objects to each other is that it will affect the vertex normals, and you definitely don't want any of the vertex normals to change anymore after you've baked your maps because if the vertex normals are different, the normal maps won't work anymore, and the shadows will look really bad. So to fix this, you need to add an edit normals modified to all of the objects you're going to attach and click Make explicit at the bottom here. That will tell the DS Max that you don't want these vertex normals to change. And now when you attach these objects together, you can see that it's not affecting the normals at all, and they're absolutely fine. So that's what you need to do if you're going to be attaching objects together or detaching objects for that matter, which I will show in a moment. I have two head meshes, so I'm just checking which one is the one with bad UVs and which one is the one with good UVs. So this gray one has the final fixed UVs. Now moving on to the shoes, I need to duplicate the shoe and mirror it so that I have two shoes. So what I'm going to do is detach this one as a clone from the rest of the baking group it's attached to. So I'm going to select all of the polygons here and then click Detach as Clone. And now the clone detached shoe, I'm going to apply a mirror modifier to it to flip it to the other side and center the mirror. And the next thing I need to apply is an edit normals modifier, select all the normals and make them explicit. When you make normals explicit, they turn green. That's how you can tell that they're explicit normals. And I've reattached it back to that group of accessories, and you can see that it all looks fine, that's great. Now what I want to do is import some placeholder eyeballs and hair because that's seeing the character bold with just eye sockets. Doesn't give me a good impression of what it's going to look like when it's done. So I've just imported these eyes straight from Zbrush, and now I'm going to import the hair. Looks like I imported the eyes at the wrong scale, though, so I'm just re importing them and making sure to set the scale to centimeters. And this time the eyes are in the correct place. So now I'm going to import the hair. The hair I've slightly decimated in Zbrush, but, you know, it's still high poly enough to look good. And now I'm going to export all of these low poly objects as a single low polymesh. And I'm going to set up a mamasip scene with them so I can check everything out with all of the maps together. I'm quickly going to go through all of these materials and set them to metalness and roughness instead of gloss and specular because metalness and roughness is what you want to work with if you're going for a PBR workflow. Specular is a bit of a different workflow, and it's not exactly what you want to work with. So I'm setting all of these things to metalness and roughness, and then I'm going to import not all of the, but some of the texture maps I've baked out. So I'll apply the material ID and the ambient occlusion and the normal maps and take a look at this assembled character. Which is really starting to come together, right? So I'm just adding the normal map for the body and then the material ID into the albedo channel and the occlusion map. And for the hair, I'm just going to set it to a kind of pink color like it is in the concept. This is just for fun. You don't really have to do this, but, you know, I kind of want to get the character starting to look like what it's meant to when it's finished. Now for the albedo map for the skin and the normal map on the skin. And some ambient occlusion. Same for the arms now. Just dragging in the normal map and the ID map and the occlusion. And lastly, the shoulder. Which has somehow ended up with its own little material just because I couldn't find anything else to lump it in with. It's a little bit unusual, but it will be fine. I'm going to apply a bit of a different material to the eyeballs, just so they don't look so creepy. And now you can take a look at the final retapologized, baked character, and it's fully real time now, but it shouldn't look any different to your high polymodel really. You don't want to be losing any of the quality of your sculpt. You pretty much want your low poly to look like the high poly. The only difference being that your low poly is real time. And that's all there is to UV mapping and baking. It's really not that hard. I know a lot of beginners struggle with it, but once you get into it, it's not all that tricky. And with MamosetTolbag, I feel like baking is a prize. There's nothing difficult to that either. So that's going to be all for UV mapping and baking. In the next set of chapters, I'll be doing a quick rig for this character, so I can get it into a cool pose for the final renders. That's going to be all for this one. Thanks for watching. 63. 01 Finalizing The Low Poly And Importing Into Blender: Hello, and welcome to the first chapter of rigging. Now that the UVs are done and everything is baked down onto the low poly, I can move on to starting to rig this model, and that's so I can get it into the final pose for the renders. Now, you can also sort of skip rigging if you go ahead and pose your model manually without any rigging. This is usually something that you would do in Z brush because in through DS MAX, there is really no practical way to go about this. It would be very difficult. It's a little bit easier in Z brush with the mask tools and being able to feather out your masks and such. It's really a matter of masking off limbs along the joints and then rotating body parts into the position you want. I really don't like doing this, though, and it's not something I really do at all because you don't have any inverse kinematics when you pose this way. So it's really hard to get the model into any more of a complex pose, at least for me. It's something I've never really done. I always do a quick rig on my models, even if it's very rough, pose that rig, and then sometimes I'll do a little bit of manual cleanup, just because if it's a very quick rig, it won't actually usually deform very well. It depends on how much work you put into the rig really and also how complex the model is. But if you do a really rough job with the rig, I find that even that preferable to manually posing the model in Z Rush without any rigging. Because even a really rough rig with really harsh deformations is still quite easy to clean up once you've actually got it posed. I think this rig is actually going to turn out pretty okay. These new auto rigging tools that are really great. So I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do that. Now, before I start any rigging, there is a couple of things I want to fix up with the model. There were quite a few clipping issues that were present in the high poly, and that's carried over to the low poly because I've had to make my low poly conform to the hi poly. So this area right here, and then I remember some in a few other places. For example, around the back here, these strings don't really slot into the high poly too well, if I remember. Or on the low poly for that matter. So I'm going to clean these issues up first, and then I'm going to move on to actually doing the rigging, because you want your low poly to be pretty much finalized before you touch any rigging. So that's what I'm going to do right now. So first, I'm going to apply the ID map material to all of these parts just because it's going to be a little bit easier to see what's going on. So I've just taken the ID maps I've baked out and plugged them into the place where the checker patterns were. So now I have my ID maps applied to the model, and I can see these clipping issues a little bit more easily. And I'm just going to ever so slightly move these parts apart in order to avoid the clipping issues that I'm having right now. So soft selection is probably a good thing to use right now, and I probably want to use edge distance as well, and really turn down the fall off distance. Don't move your things around too much. You really just want to move them as little as possible to fix the clipping because if you move them around too much, it will affect your normal map. Ideally, this is something you wouldn't have to do, but sometimes it just happens, right? You notice these things after you've done your high poly after you've done a lot of the retopo. So it's not really something you want to go back to and redo. And in that case, it's absolutely fine to just slightly edit the low poly like this. It's, you know, perfectly acceptable. So I'm just going to check that all of these aren't clipping through the side of the pants like this. And I'm going to go up to the hood, and you can see that this doesn't look great. So I'm just going to move the ends of this string around a little bit. So it just clips into the hood nice and, you know, with a straight edge. So that looks a lot better, and, you know, I think that's going to be everything. If something else comes up, I will go and adjust it, but this should do for now. So I can go ahead and export this now. And I'm going to want to export this as dot OBJ. Yeah, make sure you are exporting as an OBJ because what I'm going to be using the software, it is called let me check for a second. Act CR ACRIg is one I'm going to be using to do the Auto rig, which later on, I'm going to adjust slightly just to make sure it's perfect. And I found that it sort of struggles to import FBX files. So OBJ is probably a better option when you're exporting. And you want to make sure that you export triangles as usual. And I'm going to go ahead and export. And next up, I'll show you where to download Aca Rig from. It's a free software, so don't worry about that. And it's basically from what I've tried, it's just a better version of Mixamo. Firstly, it's a standalone piece of software that you actually install, unlike Mixamo where you have to go through a website. Trying to do three D stuff on a website, I find is always a little bit of a hassle. It's always better when you actually have a piece of software on your computer. It's just a little bit faster. And I think the results are just slightly better. Because Mixamo sort of ended up getting abandoned by Adobe. It's actually quite sad. But I'm glad there's a new auto rigger on the market that is actually getting support. So this is the website for Acig. It's by real Illusion, and it's part of their whole Actor Core setup where they have a sort of character generator and a few other pieces of software. It integrates well with those. And they also have plugins for importing these rigs into blender and three SNAx and all of the other main three applications. So actually, they've done a pretty good job of making this very useful piece of software. So just go ahead and download it for free and install. Eight. Once you have it installed, just do exactly what it says right here, drag your file in here and just wait for it to import. Once your model is imported, you'll get a screen that looks like this. So what you'll want to do is make sure that the symmetry line is right down the middle of your character. In my case, I don't have to do anything on more asymmetrical characters. You might have to move this around a little bit more, but usually I've found that this is right down the middle exactly where I need it. The other thing you might have to do is rotate the character. Not all softwares use the same up axis. So when you import, it may be rotated in the wrong direction, and you'll just have to click these buttons in order to make sure it's facing upright and towards the camera. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and click either Body Rig or Rig Body down here. They both do the same thing. Just wait for this to load. Once it's done loading, you'll see that it's placed a bunch of points around the joints of your character. And usually these will be roughly in the right position. But there's always a little bit of adjustment you have to do. For example, here, the knees aren't exactly in line here. One's a little bit higher than the other. That's definitely not something you want. The ankles are a little bit high up, too, I think, and the wrists, I think, are the same. And usually you will have to do a lot of adjustment to the shoulders and the clavicles. Now the camera controls are all on screen here. So just rotate around your character and make sure the joints look like they're in the correct position from all angles. There is no way to snap it to a side view or a front view or have it be an orthographic view. Yet I found, maybe this will be something they'll add in the future. But for now, that doesn't seem to be a feature, which is a little bit annoying, but the software is still perfectly usable. Now, the way placing points works in Acuric is a little bit different to most software. It's a little bit more streamlined. You don't get a gizmo with the different axes you can move each point in. It's largely handled automatically. So they have a feature called midpoint placement, and the way it works, I think, is it basically checks the cross section of the area wherever you leave a joint. So if I move this joint here and then rotate the camera, you can see that it's still right in the middle of the leg from all angles roughly. And now if I move it down here, it's also still right in the middle. And even if I move it to the middle of the body, you can see that it is not in the middle of the torso, but it is in the middle of the part between the scarf and the front of the torso. So it just basically looks at the furthest forward point and the furthest back point and puts your points in the middle between those two points. So it works fairly well for limbs and stuff like that. It usually gets the joints where you want them in those areas. So it's fairly useful in those cases, and it does make placement a little bit faster, but sometimes you will want to have midpoint placement turned off. For example, if I'm trying to place something from the side view, it tends to not really work. Now, you'll probably want to have symmetry turned on most of the time when you're placing stuff because a lot of these joints are symmetrical. Now, if I try and use midpoint placement from the side, maybe I want to slightly adjust the placement of one of these joints. You can see that it snapped both of the points to the middle of the torso, which isn't ideal. So just be aware that midpoint placement mostly works from the front and not the side. Now, you may have noticed here that I moved one of these knee joints to the wrong side of the body. So you can always look up to this window in the top right of your screen to see a little bit more information on where you should place each joint you have selected. This window is dynamics depending on whatever you're mousing over or have selected. So if I select this knee, I can see that it actually belongs to the right side of the body and not the left side of the body like it does here. So you always want to make sure that you have your joints on the correct side of the body. Uh, you'll also notice that all of the joints that belong to the right side of the body are in blue and all of the joints that belong to the left side of the body are in yellow, and the central joints are kind of orangish. So make sure you keep that in mind. Now, symmetry, turn it on for pants that are symmetrical, of course. Midpoint placement, sometimes you want to turn it off depending on what you're doing. So when you're trying to adjust stuff from the side, probably want to have it turned off. But a lot of the time it is helpful. Front part, midpoint placement seems to work a little bit better in some situations. For example, if I try and place something from the side, it seems to work. So I think this projects from your camera view as opposed to going through the whole mesh, which is exactly what it says right here. So switching to front part, midpoint placement can also be helpful. So that's the gist of all the different tools there are when it comes to Acuric and placing these points. Now we'll move on to placing them where I need to have them. So I'm going to start with the ankles. The ankles need to be moved down a little bit to where the ankles are on a person, so it can be hard to tell when you have a cloved character. In this case, I think it's somewhere around where the buckles are on these boots. So I'm just going to grab this point and move it over to where that point is. And you also always want to reference the little window on the top right as to where those points are meant to be that's your best indication of where you want to put stuff because these points aren't strictly anatomy based, so it's not like they are actually put where the joints are on a person, and I don't think they are strictly based on where the armature ends up going. I think there is a level of interpretation in the software between where you have placed these points and where the actual bones end up. So your best bet on deciding where to put these points is just looking up at that window where it gives you the suggestions on where to put the points. And following that. And then once you're done with that, just adjusting as you see how the character turns out. So I moved the toe bone into that position, and now I'm working on the knees. It seems like the majority of the limb joints work just fine if you put them in the middle of the limb. So you don't have to worry about moving these points forwards to where the front of the knee is or something like that. Just having them in the middle of the limb seems to work fine. Now I'm moving the points of the pelvis down a little bit. Sort of looking at the little window on the top right there and trying to interpret how that would look on my character. So yeah, for the first pass, you just want to follow the guides on the window in the top right as closely as possible. And then once you've given that a try, you can go for a second pass and sort of refine things more specifically to your model. But when you're just first trying to place your points, just follow those guides exactly as closely as you can. Now I'm going to turn off symmetry, just so I can place the joint for the mechanical arm, since I think that's not exactly in the same spot as the elbow on the other arm. So I'm just going to place that as close to the middle of that cylinder as I can. And I'll go ahead and slightly adjust the position of the other elbow too while I have symmetry turned off. And I think the other elbow was actually in a fairly good position already, so there's not too much I need to move around there. Now with symmetry back on, I'm adjusting the wrists, especially when you have gloves on that sort of hide the bones of the wrist. You really want to make sure that you get that in the right spot, not too high up and not too far down. It really is quite obvious when you have the points in the wrong place, especially for areas like the ankles and the wrists once you go ahead and rig the body. You will see and you will be able to correct these. So don't worry too much about getting these in the absolute perfect position on the first go because the really nice thing about Acurik is that you can go back and forth very easily and try things over and over again until you get them as close to perfect as you can. Once you've done placing all of the points of the body, just click hand rig and you can move on to rigging the hands. So it's very similar to the body. You just have a bunch of points that you need to place appropriately on the hand joints. So I start with the top knuckle and I try to get them into position. With the hands, I find midpoint placement doesn't work for the top row of knuckles. So once I have them placed roughly in terms of the vertical direction, I will turn off midpoint placement and then sort of move them forwards to the top of the knuckle. Closer to the surface of the hand because if they are very deep inside the hand, it just bends unnaturally sort of from the middle of the hand as opposed to where the joints are, which are the top of the hand. Midpoint placement does work for the rest of the fingers, though. So once I have the top knuckles in position, I will turn midpoint placement back on for the rest of the joints. Make sure you spin your camera around so you can really tell where those points are in three space because it can be very deceptive from one angle when you're trying to place these. Sometimes having front part midpoint placement turned on works a little bit better if you're finding that these points end up getting stuck to the body instead of the fingers. So that's something you can try if you're having that issue, and try and get these joints right on top of where the joints are for the fingers. And the last points just go to where the fingertip is. It's all explained fairly well in the window to the top right. So it's nothing really too complex. That's the entire point of the software, making rigging very easy and streamlined, so you don't have to worry about these things too much. So that's all of the fingers done. Now I'm moving onto the thumb. Thumb actually has this extra point that points outwards, and you want to align that to the direction of the thumb. In this case, it looked like it was already facing the correct direction, so I left it as it was. And now I'm moving the back thumb joint into the right position and moving this other point to the sort of inside of the wrist. And this looks like it will work fairly well. So I'm going to go ahead and mirror this to the other side. You want to be careful when you're pressing the mirror buttons. If you press the wrong one, it will mirror the hand you haven't done yet to your right hand, and you will have to redo everything because there is no undo button in Acurig so far. So be very careful about which mirror button you're pressing. And once you're done with the hands, go ahead and click Check animation and wait for it to load. And once it's done loading, you'll see the result of the whole auto rig. So you can see that this is actually a really good result that's come out of this auto rigging, and I could almost use this, and it would probably be fine with just a little bit of tweaking and manual adjustment. But I am going to go back and forth a bit and tweak a few things that I've noticed aren't quite perfect. We want to go and flick through all of the different poses just to see that everything is working. An important thing is to check the hands and fingers. Try one of the clenched fist poses and then one where the fists are open to check that all of the knuckles are placed in the right spots and are bending along the right area. In this case, the front knuckles seem to be working quite well. I'm not 100% sure about the ones lower down towards a pinky finger. They look a little bit soft. If the knuckles, when they bend seem quite soft and rounded, that's usually an indication that the joints are placed too far below the surface of the hand. Another thing you'll want to check are these T poses and A poses. Just check that the shoulders are in the right place mainly the armpits or the sort of rib cage coming along with the arms when the arms move upwards. That is something that you aren't really going to be able to fix with acuig. It's something that's really quite tricky to rig properly in general when you're doing it manually. So that's something I will be fixing in blender later on. So don't really worry about the armpit area sort of stretching outwards when the arms move upwards. The main thing I'm concerned about here is the shoulders. You can see that the shoulders are a little bit high up. It looks like she's shrugging constantly having her shoulders shrugged upwards, and they're not in a very neutral position. So I'm going to go back to body rig and play with these clavicle and shoulder joints and try and get the shoulders to be in a little bit more of a neutral position. So I'm going to start by moving the clavicles down a little bit. And seeing how that will affect the placement of the shoulders. Now, I'm not 100% sure about how these changes are going to affect the body. It's really more of a trial and error kind of thing. I'm just going to try this and see how it turns out and then go back and try again. I'm also moving the shoulder joints up a little bit towards the torso and upwards a tiny bit. And I'm going to click the check animation button again. It will re rig the whole thing, and I'll see how it turns out. So it definitely looks like the shoulders are slanted a little bit more downwards. So I think that is a bit of an improvement. I'm going to flick through all of the different animations and poses that I have available here just to see how the shoulder looks in various different positions, just to make sure that I'm happy with it. And in fact, what I'm going to do is try and move the clavicles around a little bit and see how that affects the rig. Maybe it'll make things worse, maybe it'll make them better. I just want to see what happens if I move the clavicles up a little bit. The other thing I need to make sure of is that they don't get pushed to somewhere where I don't want them, which is what midpoint placement will do sometimes. So always make sure to rotate the camera around when you are moving points with midpoint placement turned on. I've moved the clavicles a bit now back to the animation mode. And it looks more or less the same, really. Maybe the shoulders are a little bit higher up before they were slanted downwards, maybe too much. But looking at some of these animations, I'm noticing that the shoulders are sort of rotated forwards, making it look like the character has kind of bad posture, sort of what you have when you have a hunched back. The shoulders are rotated forwards. This is especially visible on the mechanical arm. So I'm going to go ahead and try to fix I'm going to try and move the shoulder joint backwards a little bit and see how that affects the rig. I'm just going to make a subtle change and not move things too far because I'm pretty pleased with how things are already. Like, this is something that I can easily sort of adjust in blender, as well. But I feel like this is maybe slightly better than what I had before. Looking from a top view, the shoulders seem to be more or less straight. Now, maybe with the mechanical arm facing forwards a little bit, but I feel like that's something I will be able to solve in blender. So that's going to be all that I'll be doing in Acig. So now it's time to export the model out of this software into something that I can use. So the first thing I'll do is I'll just save the Acurik data in case I want to return to AcurIk and maybe adjust some of the auto rig again. And with that data saved, now I'll export the file as an FBX. So I'll just click Export FBX, and I'll set my target application to blender because that's what I'm going to be using for rigging and posing. I've just found Blender to be fairly intuitive when it comes to rigging and also there's just so many resources out there teaching you how to rig in Blender compared to three DS MAX, that it's just so much easier to learn in Blender for me, at least. So that's what I'm going to be using next. I'm just going to export this FBX file out, and then you're going to want to head back online and download a plugin that will sort of convert this imported FBX into blender into a really nice rig you can use for posing. So head on over to the real Illusion website. And in the overview tab, you can find the Blender USD Export Character Pipeline page and scroll here down to where you find Blender. And on this page, just scroll all the way down to where you find a Download panel and download this plugin from Github. So just on the little code tab, click the drop down and download it as a zip file. Once it's downloaded, you'll want to head to Blender, and on the top toolbar under Edit, go to preferences. And under preferences, go to add ons. And from add ons, just select Install and go to wherever you downloaded the zip file too and just select that zip file and install add on. You don't need to unpack it or unzip it or anything. Once it's installed, you want to check this tick box. That's very important. If you don't have it checked, the add on won't be active. It'll just be installed, so you need to check that tick box. Now I'm going ahead and importing the FBX file of the model that I exported from ACRIg. Now, this is just a demonstration of why you need this plug in and how it helps because if you just import an FBX file without this plug in, all you get is the imported mature. It is a rigged model with the skin applied. So you can use this for posing, but I will quickly show you why it's actually fairly inconvenient. So if you select the armature or the skeleton, this is a little bit easier to do if you enable overlays, and the button for that is up there on the top right of the screen. If you enable overlays and select your armature, go into pose mode with the drop down menu on the top left of the screen, you can see that selecting and rotating these bones, you can pose your character this way, but it's pretty inconvenient, especially in some places some bones aren't directly connected to each other, and in those cases, those parts of the body won't get moved along with the other bones as you rotate them, so the hands and the feet get disconnected. It's really not a great way to pose the character when there are better ways, and that's what we need the plug in for. So if you click this arrow here, you will see a character creator pipeline tab, and that's what the plug in has installed for us. If you hit the n key, that will open and close this menu. Now, in the character creator pipeline tab, you'll see an import character button. So just go ahead and press that and select the mesh you exported from ACRIg and just wait a few minutes for it to finish importing. And once it's imported, you'll see that it actually looks exactly the same as it did before last time I imported, and that's because there's one more step to go to add the control rig that will make this very easy to pose. You'll want to go down to rigging and animation, and you'll notice that it says that the Rigifer add on is not installed. Luckily, though, this plugin comes with blender, so I don't have to go anywhere to download it. All I have to do is head on over to the edit menu again, to preferences, to add ons, and in this little search box, type in Rigifi and just hit that checkbox. And the rigifi add on will immediately be activated. So now I can just click Rigifi and wait a few more minutes for this character to get rigified. Once it's done, you'll see a bunch of shapes around your character, and these make up what is called the control rig. The control rig is basically a bunch of gizmos or widgets that you can use to move your character around as opposed to just selecting the individual bones and moving them around. They give you a little bit more control and automation over posing your character. So if I select this hand and start moving it around, you can see that the top half of the arm and the bottom half of the arm respond to that and are automatically positioned. I can do the same for the foot, and you can see that the leg automatically positions itself in corresponds to where the foot is and the same for the pelvis. So you can see how much more easy it would be to achieve natural poses quickly if you're posing your character this way as opposed to moving each bone individually. Now, if you head on over to the item menu and to the rig layers tab, you can hide and unhide different parts of the control rig so that your screen isn't cluttered up and you can just select the things that you need at that moment. If you want to reset a pose, just select the widgets of the parts you want to reset and head on over to pose, clear transform A, and that will reset the positions of all of those parts. We'll go more in depth on all of this stuff in the next chapter. I'll be going through and correcting some of the weight painting issues with this character and maybe adding a few extra bones to make sure that the mechanical arm can be posed properly, as well as stuff like the pouches getting deformed when the leg moves, which isn't something you really want. You want the pouches to look like a separate solid object. So I'll go through all of this in the next chapter, and this one has just been a walk through of acuig and how to get all of that stuff into blender. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 64. 02 Posing The Character: So welcome to Chapter two of rigging. Really, it's rigging and posing because I'm a character artist, and I'm not a rigging artist. I'm not an expert when it comes to rigging, and I only rig my models so I can pose them for my final renders. I don't rig them so someone can animate them. I don't rig them, so they're ready for production level, right? I can't really rig a character that would be ready for a game unless it's a really simple one, or, you know, it would take me ages if I, you know, had to do it. I'd have to learn a few things because character artists don't typically know how to rig, you know, some do, of course, lots of people are trained in multiple disciplines. But in general, the role of a character artist isn't to do their own rigging. It's a good thing to know the basics of just so, you know, you can sort of understand how topology interacts with rigging and also so you can do some basic stuff like rig transfers from one character to another and stuff like that. But generally, most don't know the ins and outs or ins and outs of rigging and weight painting and skinning, or at least not to the extent of a professional rigger and, you know, tech artist. So when I rig, I only rig for a specific pose that I'm going to have in my render or, you know, multiple poses. So I don't need my skinning or my rigging to be perfect. It just has to get me, you know, good enough for that one pose or couple of poses. So in this case, I'm actually going to copy the pose from the concept. I think it's pretty good. I like that pose, so I'm just going to copy this one. And first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use just all of the existing skinning and rigging work that's already been automated and get the character into that pose. And then once it's in that pose, I can see what's not working, what kind of stuff, you know, the skin the current weight painting and skinning isn't supporting, and just fix those areas. So I'm not doing any extra weight painting, any extra rigging work than I need to. I'm just correcting the areas that I need and nothing extra. So what I'm going to do is get this character into this pose right here from the original concept. So let me set Puref to be always on top. Let's see. Mode, always on top. There we go. And I'll head into Pose mode. Now, it might be a good idea to set up a camera with a specific lens width actually before I head into pose mode. So I'm going to add a camera. And I'm going to move this G and G is the shortcut to move something. And once you've selected move or R for rotate or S for scale. So G to move. And then you can constrain that to an axis using the X, Y, and Z buttons. This is actually really convenient. I wish three DS Max had something like this. But yeah, just going to move the camera out. And I'm going to set up a lens width. Now, I think zero. It's not zero view cameras, it's Numpad zero, so the keys at the top of your keyboard won't work. You need to use the ones on your numpad. If you don't have a number pad, I don't know. You're probably out of luck. Then you'll have to use, you know, just the drop down menu here. So zero to get into that camera view. And I can start to set up a lens width. Now, of course, this is a drawing so it doesn't have a lens width. But, you know, you can set up a focal length that sort of makes your character look cool. Really, the way your character looks can change a lot based on the focal length. And this is going to be my key shot, right? The sort of front view in this pose. It's going to be my main one. It's going to be the biggest one I have. It's going to be, you know, what I'm really focusing on. I'll have some close ups and stuff, so those might use a different focal length. But yeah, set up a camera like this, and you sort of want to pose in the direction of the camera. I'm just going to move the camera out a little bit more based on this concept, I can see the feet from a top down view and I can see the top of the head. I think the camera is high up. Again, this is a drawing, so it's not always going to look exactly like this. You're never going to be able to replicate that drawing unless you're a really good stylized character artist. Some people can actually figure that out. But, in this case, this is a more realistic take on this character, so it's not going to be exactly like that. I'm going to start posing now. And when I'm posing, I don't need most of these controls. So I'm going to go ahead and hide everything and then only unhide the things I need. So the torso is useful, and then the L and R inverse kinematics are useful and the same for the legs. I guess I'll explain the difference between inverse kinematics and forwards kinematics. So I'll just do them for this one arm, and I'll exit the camera view. Sorry, there. It's a little bit of a transition from one software to another. The camera controllers are always slightly different between blender and three Max and everything else. So sometimes I mess up my shortcuts. So these red controllers that you can see, are the inverse kinematics controllers. So if I select this hand and move it around, the elbow responds automatically. These green controllers let's move over there. They are the forwards kinematics controllers, and these are basically very simple. The bottom joints just inherit all of the transforms from the top joints. Now, you can see that my arm, by model isn't actually following these Fords kinematics controllers, and that's because what you need to do is you need to use this uh, hang on. This slider, the K to FK slider. So at one, the arm is listening to the FK controller. At zero, it's listening to the IK controller, and at a half value, you know, it's halfway in between. That's used when you're animating and you want to switch from IK to FK during an animation. So you don't need to worry about that. If you want to snap your FK hand to the K hand, you click this button, and if you want to do the opposite, you click that bottom button. So that's IK and FK. Explained. Most of the time, I'm going to be using IK. That's the whole reason really why I made this rig. Just using IK for posing is much more convenient as you can imagine. It's super hard to get the hand into the place you want using Ford's kinematics. So I'm going to just clear that pose, and I'll head back into the camera view. And I'll just start moving stuff into position. Actually, I'll I'll do that in this view. This is just posing like you would a doll or something like that, nothing too complex. For now, I'm just going to have all of the arm limb controllers active and the torso controls active. Just keeping my scene nice and clean. I don't have too much stuff on screen. And this arrow thing is the position of your elbow when you're working in inverse kinematics. So the elbow is kind of low down here. And you can see when I'm rotating, these are global coordinates. So you can just switch to local if you want to rotate around local axes. So usually you'll want to sort of have your hips counter rotated to the shoulders when you're going for poses like this, so the hips go one way and the shoulders go slightly in the other direction. It depends, really. This big box is like your entire pelvis or your entire torso, and the sort of pelvis shaped thing is just the pelvis. Oh, another thing you'll want to have is K stretch turned off. Now, these settings are individual for each IK controller. So make sure you have IK stretch turned off. That's for, like, cartoon characters and stuff like that. For a more realistic character, you don't want your limbs to be stretching around, do you? So it does take some time to match poses. I think her head is bent down a little bit in the concept. And in general, she's rotated ever so slightly, I think. I'm gonna rotate her around a bit. That looks like roughly the right angle, and now I'll move the legs into position as well. So most of the time when you're posing, you want the weight to rest more on one leg. That generally makes your characters look a lot more dynamic and less stiff. There's a technical term for that in art. It's contra posto. I'm not sure about the pronunciation there, but you can see that sculptures definitely started to look a lot more lively once the Greeks sort of introduced that, although I think there were a few attempts of that earlier as well. Now I'm trying to counter rotate the chest bones to the hips, because generally that looks kind of cool. So I'm sort of making sure that both are rotating in opposite directions. I'm not 100% sure on this yet. If you overdo this, it can start to look kind of unnatural, which I think is what is happening here a little bit. So I'll definitely have to work on that again. So I'm rotating the foot into position there, and you want to make sure that your knees are facing the right direction when you're rotating your feet. So always make sure to rotate those IK targets in the right direction when you're doing that because otherwise, you'll have a knee facing the wrong direction and it looks really unnatural, really bad. So make sure you keep those in the right place. Now, if you look here, you can see those pouches are the types of things I'm going to want to fix a little bit later with sculpting and a little bit of weight painting. You can see how bad they look when they're warped in that way. So that's something I'm going to fix later. You know, depending on the part and depending on what's easier, I'm changing the weight painting, so weighting it to different bones or just sculpting it with blender sculpting tools where weight painting is a little bit too tricky because weight painting is really hard and it's really annoying. So I want to do as little of that as possible. Um, but I'll get into that more once I'm actually doing the way painting. Right now, I just want to get this pose done. And then once the pose is done, I can clean up all of the geometry and all the warped stuff in the pose. So it's best to do your pose and then think about that stuff, just so you're not correcting stuff you don't need to correct later on. So I want to rotate the torso a little bit, but I also want the hands to follow along with the torso. I don't want them to stay where they are. So in order to do that, I need to switch the arms from IK to FK controls. So if I make my FK controls visible, you can see that they aren't where the arms are right now. So I need to use the FK to IK snap button to snap them to where the arms are right now. And then I can use the slider to transition the control over from the IK controllers to the FK controllers. If I rotate my torso around now, you can see that the arms are following along with the torso perfectly, and they're not staying where they are like they were with the IC controls. So that's the process for if you want to do that. Now I want to mess with the camera focal length a little bit, just to see how the character looks in different focal lengths. So when you're in object mode, if you select the camera object, you can find this little camera panel and increase and decrease the focal length. Now, if you just change that value, it'll just look like you're zooming in and out on your character. But if you actually move the camera back or forwards, depending on whether you increase or decrease the focal length, you'll actually see that it's doing more than that. It's changing the way the entire character looks. It's sort of changing the proportions. So if you head down to the view panel, there is a lock camera to view option, and then that will just lock the camera to your view, and you'll be able to move the camera wherever you want it just by navigating in the viewport. So if I set the focal length to something very low, you'll see that the perspective is really exaggerated, and this can actually look very cool, but it can also make your character look kind of goofy. And the same is true for a very high focal length. It sort of diminishes any sort of perspective and makes the character look very flat. Now, a very flat looking character is also kind of boring, but I feel like that so look kind of cool on robots and maybe vehicles and stuff. In general, right now, I feel like a focal length of 30 millimeters works. On a full body portrait, there is, I think a lot more leeway on what you can get away with with field of view or focal length. It, you know, there's not really, like one standard convention. You can get a character to look really cool with a very low field of view or a very high one. It really just depends on what kind of shot you're going for and what kind of character it is. When it comes to portraits, I feel like very low focal lengths tend to make the character look kind of bad. The fish eye effect on just like the face portrait makes it look, you know, it really distorts it, and it just doesn't look great. So for portraits, I tend to stick to something like 80 millimeters, something like that. That's the standard in real life portrait photography as well. So yeah, if you're just going for a portrait, do something like 80 millimeters, and then you can go up or down a little bit. But for a full body shot, just play around and go with something that looks cool. But I would say for a portfolio piece, you want your main render to be something that doesn't distort the character too much, nothing too crazy because you just want to show the model for what it is, and then you can have some other shots with some more extreme angles and focal lengths, if you want. But have one main shot where it just shows the model for what it is, and, you know, shows off your skill as much as possible with nothing too crazy. So I'm rotating with torso back to be in line with the hips because before when it was counter rotated to the hips, it felt like a little bit too much. When people are just standing up, they don't twist and turn in every single different direction. So be careful not to overdo things. I mean, it's a delicate balance of not overdoing things, but also you do want to slightly exaggerate things just so your character looks a little bit more dynamic. Of course, that also depends on what kind of character it is. Sometimes a very static pose can help a character look more, you know, imposing or, you know, grounded and strong. It really depends on the character and what you're going for. So experiment around. In this case, I do want it to look kind of dynamic. So while counter rotating the torso to the hips was probably a good idea to try. I ended up deciding that it wasn't working the way I wanted it to. So I've set it back to be in line with the hips, and now I'm moving on to moving this arm around, just trying to match the concept. And I'm moving the hips forward a bit because if I actually pay attention to the concept, that's what's going on there by the looks of it. So you do want to be careful when you're posing your model according to a two D concept or a drawing because stuff that works in two D might not necessarily directly translate to three D. There's stuff you can push angles and exaggerate stuff that if you try and copy that precisely, especially if you have a more realistic model, like in my case, it's a more realistic take on that very stylized concept. If I try and match that exactly, it might end up looking more unnatural, and if something looks more unnatural, it can actually look less dynamic than what you wanted. So be careful and be aware of that. Another thing to look out for is, you know, you pose your model, and it looks great from one angle, but as soon as you spin your camera around, it looks, you know, super awkward from any other side angle. So if you're planning on having multiple camera shots from several different angles, you need to account for that. If you're just planning on doing one render from the front or from whichever angle, then that's less important because you're only working for that one single shot. But in my case, I want to get three or four good renders out of this, not just one. So I'm spinning the camera around and thinking, look at it from all sorts of different angles as I'm working. So I'm pretty happy with the general pose right now. All of the limbs are where I want them to be and so is the torso and the spine. So I'm going to move on from here to really starting to refine this. So I'll have to flex up these pouches that are looking kind of bent and warped in that little square of cloth. The neck piece is also twisting with the head, which I don't want. The elbow on the skin arm is, you know, bending in a really soft and awkward way. And I have a similar issue with the mechanical arm bending more like a soft surface object and not a hard surface object. That's all stuff I'm going to have to correct a little bit later. But I did remember that I still need to pose the fingers and to pose the fingers, I need to get them a prop that they can wrap around. So I'm importing the knife object. Now, this was modeled completely separately from the character, so its scale doesn't really correspond to the scale of my character, and I need to sort of figure it out. So I'm just importing it a few times to see if there is an actual correct scaling option on import that would have worked, but there wasn't I'm just manually going to have to scale this knife down and see what size works for the character. So one of the ways I chose to do this is just to scale it to fit this little pouch around the back. So I'm just moving it into position, and I'm going to scale it until it looks right until it fits into that place, and I can compare it to the TD concept, as well. So something like this looks like roughly the right size, but actually, I might want it to be a little bit bigger than this, just so it fits in the hand more nicely. So I'm scaling it up a little bit more again. And remember, you can always switch between global and local transforms depending on what makes it easier to position your object. It's just that little drop down menu at the top. So something like this is more towards the scale than I need for it to sit nicely in the hand. Before it was a little bit too small, it would have been a little bit awkward, and it wouldn't have shown up very well in the renders. So yeah, figure out the scale of the props you need. Of course, it helps if you model these things together so that you can sort of keep the size consistent and you don't need to guess this much. But in my case, it wasn't available that way, so I sort of had to guess the size. Now, when I'm posing this prop, I need to make sure that from the front view, it's not just completely edge on towards the camera. A little bit of a side profile helps to show what this is from the front view. So keep that in consideration. If you just have the knife facing blade towards the camera, you're not really going to be able to tell what it is. You can see as I'm trying to pose the fingers with these orange finger controllers, they are bending the fingers in the wrong direction. So I think this is a bit of a bug in the way the plug in that converts the Acur armature to a rig offi rig works. You know, it might be user error. In this case, maybe I rigged up the fingerbnes wrong or something like that. But either way. Those controllers didn't really work properly for me until I rotated them around in the correct direction. So it depends. If you have the same issue, then you'll have to do this, as well. If you don't, you know, that's absolutely fine. So don't be alarmed if your fingers are all twisted in the wrong direction like they are here. What you can do to fix this is just rotate the orange controller. In this case, in the y axis for me worked, it might be different if your fingers are rotating in a different direction. So yeah. And these orange controllers, they work just by scaling them. If you scale them up, that stretches the finger outwards. If you scale them down, it clinches the finger together. And then there is a second set of finger controllers. These give you a little bit of a finer control over every joint in the finger. Every single one of these green joints is one of the joints of the knuckles. Uh, I'm not sure why they're not placed over the actual knuckle, but in the middle of the finger. Again, maybe just a bug with how the plug in works, or maybe they're meant to be there. I'm not 100% sure, but you can still kind of figure out what part of the finger they're meant to control. The main thing to make sure of here when you're posing the fingers is that they're only bending forwards and backwards, and the knuckles aren't bending sideways, which, you know, makes your fingers look broken or arthritic or something like that. So if that's not something you want, then you definitely don't want to make sure that all of your fingers are bending straight and not sideways. So be careful. I think these controls probably aren't perfect, and, you know, that's just one of the things you have to deal with when you use automatic rigs, something like fingers, they have to be very precise and detailed. So auto rigs don't always do a great job with this stuff. But you can see that I can still get this stuff to work. I just have to pay attention and make sure that I'm rotating everything in the correct direction and make sure that, you know, I'm rotating those orange controllers in the correct direction as well. Now, when it comes to posing hands, one thing to remember is don't make every single finger be in a different position because when we move our hands, we tend to move all the fingers together. When you're grabbing something, you know, you'll clench something with all of your fingers together. You don't usually move one finger down and one finger up. In fact, you know, you can't there are some positions where you just can't move your hands. So yeah, generally, all of the fingers move together, and then, you know, you do have some precise control over every single finger, but they sort of move as one. So make sure that you're not giving every single finger, like, a completely different position, completely different pose because that'll look unnatural, unless that's what you're going for. So kind of, like, horror reach or something spooky, then, you know, it's pretty common to do something crazy with the fingers. So the time when we're moving our hands around, the fingers move together. So in this case, I'm going to have most of the fingers sort of clenched together, and then maybe the index finger sort of points out a little bit more just like in the concept. But again, take your time with this. You definitely want to make sure that all of the things aren't twisted up like they are a little bit here. So using the green controllers gives me control over every single joint, and I can make sure that everything is rotated in the correct direction here. So right now, I'm kind of trying to match what I see in the concept. So the fingers are bent the most at the second joint, at least the two middle fingers, and then the pinky finger is sort of hanging in midair and the index finger is pointing upwards, sort of following the edge of the bottom of the knife. So I'm trying to match that for now. But as I've said before, something that works in two D won't always work in three D. So while that does work with those stylized kind of thingers, I'm having a little bit of trouble matching it in three D and getting it to look as actual and as nice. Of course, when you're drawing, you can put on some sharp lines, some sharp angles and get this to look a little bit more cool. In three D, in this more realistic version of the model, I don't see that it's working so well, having the two middle fingers bent downwards in that kind of position and then the other stretched out. I'm trying to get it to work. But if it doesn't work, then I'll go ahead and adjust it accordingly. Because right now, if I look at this from the camera view, it doesn't look right. It looks awkward. It looks kind of weird. So I'm going to have to go through and change this up slightly. One thing that I think might be wrong is knife is sitting a little bit low down in the palm. Generally, when you're holding something, the top of the object lines up with the top of your palm. So I'm moving the knife up a bit and I'm also rotating it upwards, just so it's not sitting so flat when I look at it from the camera view, I kind of want it to be pointing upwards a little bit more. So yeah, I'm moving the knife upwards and then I'm playing with the rotation so that it looks nice in the camera view. And now I'm going to try and wrap the fingers around it. So when you're moving the thumb around, remember that generally, the lower joint of the thumb moves around a lot. So don't forget that one when you're trying to get the thumb to hold something or something like that. That bottommost joint actually does most of the work, right? It's what makes our thumbs opposable. So that's probably a key feature when you're trying to get the hand to hold something. Don't neglect that bottom joint. Don't just be moving around the two top joints. And now I'm trying to wrap the fingers around the object. So I think where I was going wrong before was I wasn't bending the first joint of the fingers down enough because generally, when you're trying to grab hold of something, you bend the first joint first, and then the other ones wrap around the object as well. While you can bend just the second joint of your fingers by itself, it's not what you do when you're trying to hold onto something. So I'm spreading the second joints out a little bit and bending the entire finger down. And this definitely looks like a more natural grip of this knife. So I think I'm moving in the right direction here now. And once I've got that first joint in place, I move the others in position in accordance with that. And I need to make sure that, like I said earlier, that none of the knuckles are sort of twisting back and forth, that they're only bending in one direction so that the fingers don't end up looking wonky. And again, because this is an auto rig, these fingers won't be skinned perfectly. So one thing I'm going to do to address that is later on, I will do a little bit of sculpting to make these fingers, you know, instead of skinning the fingers because that's kind of a chore, you've got a lot of these very small parts that are close to each other, so it's hard to weight paint these areas. So instead of doing that, I'll just do a little bit of sculpting on top just to make them look a little bit more natural in areas where they may be skinned less properly where they're bending too softly or something like that. In general, these things look pretty okay to me, aside from maybe the first knuckle, that looks like it's bending a little bit too softly to me. Of course, part of that is because this is a glove. So, you know, the fabric sort of softens out any sort of joints you might have. But I do feel like it's a little bit lacking in that area when I look at it. So I'm going to be doing a little bit of sculpting on top. So I'm starting to feel pretty happy with how the hand is set up now, like the whole pose and how the knife fits into the hand and how it sits there. If I take a look at this from the camera view, I feel like the hand is reading quite well now. It's not facing the camera at some sort of awkward angle. Think the knife could maybe be rotated a little bit more so you can see more of it and tell what it is a little bit better. So I may adjust that later, but for now, it's looking fairly good. Just tweaking the pose of the body a little bit here while I'm in this view. You can always find little tweaks and adjustments you want to make with things. But yeah, right now, I'm pretty happy with that hand. And what I want to do is try and set up a prop in the other hand. Now, in the concept, she has a gun in that hand, but I don't have a gun made, so I'm just going to use another knife. One thing I wanted to try was a reverse grip for this knife just so that both hands have a slightly different pose. But one worry I do have with the knife in this position is that it's not going to be it's not going to read well from the front camera view. You're not going to be able to tell what she's holding in her hand like this because, you know, it'll be hidden behind the body, and you'll just see, like, the very end of it poking up from the hand. So it might look a little bit weird. And if I take a look at it from the camera while it's in this rough position, you can definitely see that. It doesn't quite make sense there. So one thing I want to do to make posing that knife a little bit easier is to parent the knife to the handbone and that way, the knife will move along with the hand. Now, I don't really need to do this for this knife right now because it's pretty much done posing, but I'll do it anyway. So what you need to do is select your object and then shift select the armature and go into pose mode, not edit mode like I did here. What you need to do is go into pose mode. So select the object, shift select the armature, going into pose mode, and then hit Control P and set parent to bone. And now that object is parented to the bone. In this case, I parented it to the defamation bone. You could also parent it to the IK handle. That would work fine as well. But I think the defamation bone is a little bit more consistent because that'll work regardless if you're using K or FK to pose the hand. And you can see there that if I move the hand around now, the knife follows around with the hand. So that makes posing it a little bit easier because you won't have to independently rotate the hand and the knife every time you want to do it. So I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for the other hand and the other knife. So I need to go into object mode and select the knife and then the armature and go into pose mode, and then I can control click on the palm bone. But I accidentally deselected the knife here, so I'm going to redo that. And now with those two selected, I can use Control P and parent to bone. And if I move the IK control now or the FK control, for that matter, it will move the knife around as well. So that makes posing the hand very easily. And I can try and rotate the hand around in an angle where this knife reads a little bit more well, even though it's in the same pose. You know, just spinning the hand around can make it a little bit more visible to the camera view and make it look a little bit better. So that's what I'm trying to do. I still want to try and incorporate this grip into the pose, but see if maybe rotating the hand around a bit will make it look a little bit better from that camera view. But I tried it, and there's really no way to get it to work without, you know, twisting the hand into a really unnatural position. So I'm going to go for something a little bit different now. I'm going to try and have the knife just hanging from that little ring at the top with one of the fingers put through the ring. So I'm just going to have the knife sort of dangling from one finger. I think that might be a kind of nice pose that is in character for this character. And it'll look kind of cool and be a little bit different. So, you know, there's a little bit of variation between both hands and how they're holding something. I think that's always a little bit more interesting. Now, if you don't want to, you can go a little bit more simple with your poses. If you don't have any ideas or you're just getting a little bit tired of the project and you just want to move along, then, you know, go for something simple, just, you know, have the character not be standing completely static at the very least. But I do think it helps to give your character an interesting pose, something that is maybe in line with the actual character of your character. I think it helps capture people's attention a little bit more. So if you've uploaded your character to ArtStation or whatever other website, if people are just browsing by and they see your character in a more interesting pose, it's a little bit more expressive. I think that will draw in a little bit more attention than if you just have your character just standing there, not doing anything. That's my opinion, at least. So I'm trying to adjust this finger into the correct position. There's quite a bit of weight being put on this one finger, so I kind of want that to come across in the pose. So I think bending this finger upwards a little bit more will make it look like it's putting in more work in trying to hold that knife up. So that's what I'm doing. I'm going to rotate it upwards a little bit, and I'm going to try and have the knife sort of resting in between the first joint of the finger. I think that'll work quite well. And I'll rotate the entire palm down a bit so that it looks like the knife is sort of pulling on that first joint a little bit more. That's my reasoning behind these positions and what I'm doing right now. So I think this is moving in the right direction. And right now I'm rotating the knife around, sort of thinking about how it's going to look from the camera view because again, I don't want it to just be edged towards the camera because that won't read very well from a distance. You won't really be able to tell what it is. And I'm going to leave the rest of the fingers sort of stretched out like this, and I'll move them towards each other a little bit. There is one other bone here at the back of the hand, and that sort of controls the twisting of the entire palm because you can sort of, you know, bend your entire hand, the metacarpals of the hands. So that's what that bone does, and I think bending it around a little bit helped as well. And I'll just have the thumb touching the tip of that ring as well. I think that about does it for the pose of the actual hand. Now, looking at this from further away, I want to move the entire arm backwards a bit because having your hand sort of in front of your center of mass always makes the character look a little bit stiff. So moving it back usually helps it look a little bit more dynamic. And I'm pretty happy with this pose now. I think, you know, it looks natural enough, but it also is pushing a few angles a little bit to look a little bit more dynamic, not to toot my own horn. Ah, so that's going to be all for posing. In the next chapter, I will be sculpting away issues with the skinning like this. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next chapter. 65. 03 Fixing Custom Normals: Welcome to Chapter three. Now, I've actually had to go back and re record this chapter because I run into an issue a little bit later on. It turns out that AcuiC doesn't actually preserve custom normals, which is a little bit of an issue. Because I've already baked the normal maps the character for this character, I can't have the vertex normals changing anymore. Otherwise, the normal map will shade incorrectly. So what I was going to do in this chapter was do a sculpting pass on the whole character to sort of clean up any areas where the definiton isn't quite perfect. So, like, This pouch right here. So stuff like this pouch clipping through the arm and a few other things that would be a pain to fix with skinning, but very quick to fix with sculpting. But instead of that, I'm going to first export this model out into Mama's at Tolbak so I can show you what the issue is and then show you what you need to do to resolve it. It's not a big fix, but it's definitely something you need to do before you start doing any sculpting on the character. Hopefully, this will be fixed by the time you do this tutorial. I can't imagine that, you know, Accurig won't get this feature in the in short order. They've actually already improved the the camera topples in Accurig while I've been recording this, there was an update, and now you can snap the views to different orthographic angles. So I'm sure this will be fixed, you know, very soon, but if it isn't fixed, I will be showing you how to fix it. And in general, it's a good thing to know in case you run into the issue for whatever other reason. So to export this character, I'm just going to select everything, and I'm going to export as an OBJ file. Because the OBJ exporter works a little bit better with if you want to export a model that's posed, but without the armature. Now, the reason why I don't want to export it with the mature or with, you know, any rigging, I basically want to bake down all of the rigging and the pose into a static mesh because I found that importing this whole mature into Moms tobag it just takes a little bit longer, and I don't need it because this character isn't actually moving or animated. So I'd much rather just export it without. Now, there is the option to apply all modifiers when you export as an FBX. But if you hover over this option, you will see the warning or, you know, a little pop up that appears that says it doesn't apply the mature modifier, and that's what I want on export. I could always just apply the modifier over here if I wanted to export as an FBX for some reason, but exporting as an OBJ will work just fine. And this modifier, if you have apply modifiers checked on, it doesn't have any sort of exclusion for the mature. So I'll export this model. I'm going to import this into Mama zt tobag and show you what the issue is. Here's a model in MamasetTolbag. From a distance, it might look fine. But if you zoom in, you can start to see the issues. I've applied some of the normal maps here. If you look here, you can see there's definitely a shading error here. There's shading areas around the belt buckle. That's all meant to be straight. Same over here, very apparent in areas like this. Having a little bit of roughness, a higher or lower roughness value helps you see because of the highlights. You can see that they're taking on a sort of triangulated shape, where the vertex normals don't match up with those of the original low poly that was used for baking. Having metalness turned on can help make it more obvious as well. But, you know, sometimes it doesn't work entirely. But yeah, you get the idea. The normals are pretty broken across this whole mesh. In some areas, it's less apparent. In other areas, it's more apparent. So the glove kind of looks fine to me, but you can see the belt is quite messed up. Right here, especially the more hard surface something is, the more apparent it is. But this extends across the whole mesh. I think, right here, you can see a bit of an issue. If I go down to the boots. There's definitely some you know, something wrong right here with this little spike in the triangulation. So it's prevalent across the entire model. And it's just because it seems like AcurIg does not preserve the vertex normals. I've tried I've actually tested this now. I've tried some very extreme examples where I took the edit normals modifier and moved all of them normals to face one direction. So, you know, it's super obvious if you have the normals exporting out of Acurig the same way they import it or not. And yeah, they were completely reset. So for now, it seems like AcurIg doesn't respect custom normals. I find it really odd that that's an oversight. I'm 100% sure if that's user error or not. It could be, or maybe they just haven't implemented it yet. I don't know. But if you run into this same issue, I will show you how to fix it without too much trouble, without too much additional work. But it is best if you catch this before you do any sculpting on the model after posing, right? So you can pose the model, but that's okay. You know, you can still fix this issue when the models posed, but if you've sculpted and deformed the model, unless you've set up shape keys on the sculpt and you can turn the sculpt off whenever you like. That's probably something that's recommended as well. But if you haven't done that, then, you'll have to go back to at least when you pose the model. So I'm going to show you how to fix this issue now. So the way I'm going to be fixing it is I'm taking the rig I got out of Acurig and I'm transferring that rig to my old model in blender. So even though what came out of Acurik has messed up normals, and that's not really usable to me, but the rig there is absolutely fine. So what I can do is I can transfer that rig to my unrigged model and keep the good normals from the unrigged model. So I'm going to go ahead and import my unrigged model. Here it is. Now, you want to make 100% sure that list looks correct in Mam Z Tolbag. Get it into Mamas Z toolbag, apply all of your normal maps and double check that they don't have the same issues that I showed you before. You want to make sure that this mesh is perfect. It's got the same topology, the same vertex normals as what you used for baking. Now, with this model, I'm going to import it. I'll make a new collection. And I'm going to import the rigged character. So with the CC pipeline menu, the character create a pipeline plug in that I installed. I'm going to import it just like I showed you in the first rigging chapter. So there's my imported character. Now, I'm doing this in a fresh file. You don't have to. You can use the original file, you know, where you already have this character setup. But if you're importing it into a new one and you want to So in blender, where you have your posed model, go ahead and import the unrigged model with good normals. Make sure you know, doubly sure that those normals are definitely good. So I'm going to go ahead and import a model with all of the good normals. Just the model that I used for baking. So here it is. I've gone ahead and imported it. Let me move it to a different collection, so it doesn't get in the way, so I can easily hide and unhide it. So here's my good model. We have good normals. And I have checked. This one does shade correctly in Mamo set Tolbag with my normal map supplied. So this is definitely the one I need. Now, go ahead and join all of the different parts together. I'm just going to hit Control J to join them together, and you'll want to do the same thing for the rigged body. I've already done that here. So if I go over here, you see I've already joined all of these parts together. Now, on your rig, click on the armature, so any of these gizmos and go ahead to rest position. That will put your model in the default pose. And you'll notice One thing that you may have is your model will be just slightly offset from your original model. I think Anchor Rig just does that. Whenever it rigs, it seems to slightly offset your model. Because if I go to the transform properties, I have had to offset the entire rig ever so slightly by 0.01 meters. So if your model is slightly offset, that's absolutely fine. Just get it roughly into position. Well, when I mean roughly, you have to be fairly precise. Over here, a few parts are ever so slightly out of position. You can see on these, especially, you know, I could probably get this perfect if I really tried to dial it in, but I won't will be good enough for a rig transfer because this isn't a perfect rig either way. It's kind of a rough one. So in that case, it will be fine. If this were, like, a final game rig, then you would want to be a bit more precise. But in this case, I'm going to be sculpting away any errors. So I'm not going to spend more time getting it more precisely into positioned. But yeah, if you import your original model, your original mesh, and you notice that it is slightly offset from the rigged one, then just try and position the rigged one to be as close to the original one as possible. Okay, so now in object mode, select the original mesh, not the other wy round. Select the rigged mesh, and then select your unrigged mesh. And then go to weight paint mode in this drop down menu and go to weights transfer weights. Sorry, I miss clicked there. So go to weights, transfer weights. Go to weights and transfer weights. Now, you'll want to make sure that the source layer select is by name. That's very important. Otherwise, it will only do transfer one vertex group. So if you do it by name, then it will transfer all of them. So make sure this is turned on. The other thing you'll want to do is in this drop down menu, select nearest face interpolated. I've found to have the best results with that and set the ray radius to 5 meters. I'm not 100% sure about this one, but this seems to work, and it's what I've seen other people use. So these settings are fine. So yeah, nearest face interpolated. In this dropdown menu, set your rate radius to something like five. And the most important setting here is source layer select by name. So make sure this is by name. And once that's done, the vertex group vertex groups should be transferred. So if I go back to object mode, I can hide this strict model. But there's still one thing missing here. So if I go to my original unrigg model, you can see that it does have all of the different vertex groups, but it doesn't have the armature applied to it. So now in the modifiers tab, go to add modifier. Under deform, the first one is armature and just pick the object as the whole rig, and now it should be working just fine. So if I go back to the rig and go to the object data properties and set it to postposition, now my original mesh is getting posed and I know this is the original one because I can go ahead and delete the imported one and everything works just fine. Now if I go ahead and export this to Mast Tolbag I'm going to name it this posed rig transfer test and make sure apply modifies is turned on and all of these other headings are turned on, go to export VOBJ and I'll head into Moms tool Bag and show you that this works. So here I am just going to drag and drop posed rig transfer test, and let me hide the old one and apply all of these materials. I so if I take a look at my model in MmsTuban now, you can see that the normals are fine. This was a problem area before, and you can see now that everything is shading very nicely. To compare it to the old one, you can see that that was really bad, definitely broken. And looking at my fix, it's all good now. So there was another problem area down here, I think, much less noticeable in this area, though. So I'll turn metalness on. Hang on, let me find the material. So you can see now this is shining smoothly. There's no weird triangulation there. Everything is perfect. At the hard surface arm, also all good. So, yeah, that's how to fix that issue if it hasn't been resolved by the guys at Real Illusion, I think, is who makes Accuri. I really hope that this would be something to be fixed very soon, or I really hope it's just an issue with me. Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe it didn't like what I exported or something like that. I have no idea. But if this is an actual issue that is common, custom normals are not being preserved by Acurig then here's how to fix it. You just take whatever Acurig puts out as a rig, and in blender, you use the weight transfer tool to transfer it back to your original model. And that way, you know that all of the normals are still definitely there exactly as you left them. So yeah, that's that fixed. Now I can move on to doing some sculpting and finalizing this model. That's going to be all for this chapter. I'm just going to keep it really quick and simple one subject in this one. I don't want to muddle this up with all of the stuff that's going to be in the next chapter because this is a kind of pretty big issue that can pop up, and I want this to be easy to find to anyone browsing through the tutorial. So that's all for this one. Thanks for watching, and in the next chapter, I'll be doing some sculpting, so stay tuned for that one. 66. 04 Adjusting The Weight Painting: So I fixed the issue with the normals. I have my pose completely done. More or less, I may change it later. But what I want to do now is fix up all of these sort of defamation errors. So you can see these pouches kind of bending awkwardly. Same way the neck piece. I probably want to fix that. And then this pouch is clipping through the arm as well. And some of this mechanical arm is twisting around a bit, which doesn't make it look very hard surface, so I want to fix that as well. Now, you can fix this by going in and weight painting and, you know, fixing all of these things. But that would take ages, and it's actually quite difficult. You know, it's a particular skill set that requires quite a bit of practice, especially if you have a more complex character with, you know, several belts and stuff like that. You know, it's a whole separate profession to character art, and it's quite difficult, and it's a lot of work. So, you know, for a single pose for a single, you know, pose getting rended out into just images, it's really not worth the effort. So instead of going in and perfecting all of the skinning for, you know, every single joint and getting rid of all of these issues, what I'm going to do is just mainly sculpt them away. And then for some of these, I may do some basic changes to the weight painting or maybe some other tricks which I'll show you. But I'm not going to make a perfect weight paint for this character. It's not going to be animation ready. I'm just going to make it look great for this single shot and render it out. Because otherwise, you know, it's just too much work to really, you know, be effective. And it's not something that I am particularly skilled at because most character artists don't do a lot of skinning, a lot of rigging themselves. That's generally handled by other people that are trained in those things and do those things as a career. Now, of course, a lot of character artists will also be trained in both things or have expertise in both things. But in general, it's not expected of character artists to know the ins and outs of rigging. So this very basic auto rig gets me 90% of the way there, and I can just clean up the final 10% with a little bit of sculpting, which takes a lot less time than going in and doing perfect weight painting for everything. So that's what I'm going to show you how to do now. I'll start with this shoulder pad. So for hard surface stuff like this that I don't want to deform at all, I can basically pose these things the same way I pose the knives. So parenting them to a bone and just not actually weight painting them at all, just having them parented to a bone as a static object. So what I can do with the shoulder pad is just detach it. The shortcut for that in blender is P, so I can just separate the selection. And if I go back into object mode, you can see that this shoulder pad is still pose. I don't want it to be because I don't want it to be deforming at all. I want it to act like a solid rigid object with no deformation, so I'm just going to delete the armature. Now I'm going to set the whole model to the rest position, and I'll select the shoulder pad. So I'm just going to select the shoulder and then shift click on the armature and go into pose mode, and I'll turn on Xray mode. And I can either parent this to the defamation bones. So this layer is where the actual defamation bones are if I make it visible. I can pare it to either one of these bones or I can actually parent it to one of the rig bones. It doesn't really make a difference. Just be aware of these bone layers. So if I go down to the rig layers panel, these are basically just shortcuts to the same bone layers. So, you know, you can find all of these either in this menu or over here. Of course, they're not named here. But there are a few that aren't found in this menu. And these are more like the bones that actually make the rig work. Because all of these layers, they're just sort of handles for you to select and move the model around, and they have different shapes and different colors so you can easily identify what you're selecting. And they're a little bit more convenient to select than the actual bones. And then this defamation layer, if you click on one of these bones, you can see that it's called DEF for defamation. These are the bones that actually deform your model. And then there are also a few other utility layers. Like this one and this one. And these are necessary for how rig works and how those bones are manipulated. So there's a bunch of very technical stuff that goes into that. You can choose to attach this shoulder pad to one of the defamation bones, and that's probably a better idea than attaching it to one of the actual rig bones. So I'm going to go ahead and shift click. This clavicle bone and then press Control P, set parent to bone. And now the shoulder pad is directly parented to that bone, but there's not going to be any defamation, any weight painting. Is it will just receive transformation from this bone. So that makes it behave a little bit more like a rigid object. And if I unhide all of these and go back into the post position and go back into pose mode, you can see that it still moves with the rest of the body as normal. But if I go into object mode, I can select the shoulder pad and move it around entirely separately, rotate it, however I want it as well. Now, it's rotating from its point of origin right now, and its point of origin is, you know, on the ground over here. So what I can do is go to object set origin, origin to geometry. Now the origin is right in the middle of this object and it will rotate around itself. So that's a little bit more convenient. And, you know, if I feel like this shoulder isn't quite in the right position from wherever I'm rendering, I can just go ahead and tweak it slightly and put it wherever I want. Right now, I think this is fine, though, and the nice thing now is that it's not deforming at all. So that's one way you can fix the rigs slightly is just to detach solid objects and parent them directly to bones instead. And this way you skip like one or two extra steps of weight painting. You could do the same thing by just applying a single weight to this entire object. To a single bone. But in that case, you wouldn't be able to manipulate it around separately. Another thing you can do is add an extra bone to the rig and then weight it all to that bone, and then you can freely manipulate that bone just like I can manipulate this as a separate object. Actually, that's what I'm going to do for these pouches. And the reason why I'm going to do it for these pouches and not do the pouches the way I did this shoulder pad is because the pouch lid sort of is still attached to the body, so it has to slightly deform. So I want to, you know, have a little bit of weight painting transition from the lid to the body of the pouches. So that's what I'm going to show you next. So if I select the whole armature, I can go into Edit mode for it, and I'll set it to transparency. And I'll hide all of these rig layers because they're getting in the way. I only want to see the defamation bones right now. It makes it a lot easier to see. And I'll also shift click on one of these empty layers. And this is where I'm going to put all of the bones that I will be adding. So I'll be able to remember that they're all in this layer. There's no way to really name these layers in this menu. So, you know, you just need to remember where you put what. I think there is a way to name layers, but, you know, it's sort of overkill for what I'm doing here. I'm just going to be adding two extra bones. So I'm going to select this, let's see. This first spine bone or maybe the second spine bone, actually. Yeah, I think I'll be selecting the second spine bone, and I'll just hit E and extrude out from it. Now, it's extruding out two bones instead of one, so I'll just delete one of these. If you just want it to extrude one, I guess you can go in and select just the end tip of the bone and then extrude. And I'm extruding these bones out from the end of that bone, and I'm just going to put them at the tops of these pouches. And what I'll do is I'll extrude out anova bone from these. So I'm just going to shift select both of the ends and extrude out another bone. So this will mean that the pivot point that these bones rotate around, actually, I don't need to do this. I can just do it this way. So this will be fine. So what I can go ahead and do is go into object mode now, select the body. Now, select the mature. And then the body and go into wet pate mode. And now I can weight both of these pouches directly to these bones. So if I can stroll click this first one. You can see has no weights. That's what the purple color means. Then I can go into paint mask into this face select mode. And if I hover over one of these pouches and press L, you'll select all of these faces. I'm going to select all of the lower components of this pouch. And with this bone selected, I can go to weights and set weight. Now all of these pouch parts have a value of one applied to this bone. The issue is that it still has all of the other values from different bones applied to it, so it's still not going to deform correctly. So after I've done that, I need to go and click normalize A, and now it is purely weighted to the single bone. So go ahead and do the same for the other parts. Control click the S Bone, but you can't control click other bones while you're in Face select mode, so you need to exit Face Select mode. Then Control click the next bone, go back into Face Select mode. And just hovering over the parts you want to select and pressing L to select entire elements. Go to weights, set weight and weights normalize all. And there we go. And now I need to do a little bit of weight painting for the lids, because you can see, I still want the base of the lid to be attached to the body, but I want the top of the lid to, you know, I need to blend between the body and these pouch bones somewhere at this point. So I'm going to deselect everything and then select this lid, and then I can exit Face select mode. And hang on. With face select mode still on, if I use the paintbrush, it will only paint on my selected faces. So this works as a sort of masking tool. So it's useful for that. So I can go ahead and just paint this in to a nice value that will stick to the body. So there's some faces down here that I can't quite reach. Oh, no, actually, the issue here is when you're painting weights, there is a very important setting you need to have turned on. And that is, if you go down to the tool panel under options, you need to have autormalized turned on. Otherwise, whatever you paint will have the same issue as when I applied a weight to these pouches. You know, you can paint a value of one to this bone, but it will still have all of the values from the other bones. If you have autoormalized turned off, if you have autonormalized turned on, then it will start to remove values from other bones as you paint to this one. So now if I paint this area up, it will work a lot better. The other thing you can do if you're struggling with painting the backside of an object or something like that under fall off, you can set it to projected, and that should hit the back faces a little bit easier. And also, you need to have front faces only turned off. And now it should be easier to paint this part. So I just want a value of one for the entire front part. Looks like I kind of got some of those back faces there, so I don't want that. You need to be careful when you have projected mode turned on and front face is turned off. It's very easy to paint on areas you don't intend to. So something like this, and then maybe I'll blur the top part out a little bit. So this is the blur brush, and you can use it to sort of blend and blur things a little bit more. Maybe I will add a little bit more this way and then go over and a little bit more here. So something like this should do. Looks like there's a few values I miss there. Yeah, something like that should do for this pouch lid. Any other very small issues I can also correct via sculpting. But this is a very quick way to get most of the way there. Now this pouch is deforming mostly correctly, and if there are any minor deformation issues, I can fix them up with a little bit of sculpting. Um, I want to do a minimal amount of weight painting and stuff here just because it takes a very long time to do a good job with weight painting. It's a lot harder than sculpting. Sculpting, you just pick up the vertices you want and you move them where you need them. Weight painting, you really have to balance stuff and work back and forth. It's a lot harder. So I only do stuff that's easier with weight painting while it's easier than sculpting. Soon as it becomes a little bit tricky, like having to blend between several bones, you know, in some areas, you have three bones affecting a single area. So like the armpit, and you have the shoulder bones, the arm bones, and then the chest bones all sort of competing for the weights in that single area, and you have to figure out which weights go exactly where in order to get the armpit to deform as correctly as possible. Areas like that are way harder to figure out with weight painting and skinning than they are to just sculpt to look correct. So for areas like that, I'm definitely not going to bother with weight painting. With something like this pouch, where I just have to have a little bit of fall off between the body bones and the pouch bone. You know, I can just weight paint that. That's very easy. It took me a few seconds. So, you know, that's where I draw the line between fixing up some of the weights and just sculpting away the errors. So I'm going to select this next bone, and I'll do the same thing. I'll deselect the lid of that pouch and then select the lid of this one, and I'll start painting up the values. And I'll have a little bit of blur here as well. So I think something like this will do, and any other issues that arise, I will clean up. We have a little bit of sculpting. So that's the pouches done. You see they look pretty good. I can also go ahead and reposition them now slightly if I don't like where they ended up. So let me go to my mage and go into pose mode, and I can just go ahead and rotate these around. But you can see this isn't a very convenient way to reposition them because I can't really do much. I can only rotate around the axis, nothing more. And you can see I probably accidentally skinned a few faces too many here to the spoone, so I'm going to have to correct that as well. So what I can do to make this a little bit easier to pose to make it a little bit more independent is to go into edit mode. And then select these bones and press Alt P, I think. And don't clear parent, disconnect bone. So if you disconnect the bone, it will still stay parented to its parent. So if I use G to move this around, you can see this little line. That means it's still parented. That means it still inherits transformations from the parent, but it can also have its own independent transformations on top of that. So that lets me put this bone basically wherever I want, instead of having it attached to that parent. So now I'm going to move this around so it sort of is a little bit closer to the pouch. Or closer to where the pouch attaches to the body, and this way, rotating it and moving it around will make a little bit more sense and be a little bit easier. Lt P and then disconnect bone, and now I'll move it into position where the pouches. So if I go into pose mode now, and now I can rotate these pouches around, and they make a little bit more sense. You can see I accidentally pinched a few vertices in the wrong place there as well. So I'll have to fix that. And I can also move these ever so slightly if I feel like it, all that good stuff. So let me go into wet paint mode and correct those few things that I messed up. You can see that's the real risk of having back faces turned off and project mode turned on. You can really hit vertices on the other side of your mesh by accident. So I'll go ahead and just paint these values away. That should be fixed now. And if I control click while in pose mode, I can still move these bones around. So I can go ahead and unpaint these values with a value of zero to fix them. Just be careful not to hit some of the parts I don't need. Sometimes, you know, you saw right there. I wasn't touching anything else, but it was still painting onto them because, you know, it was very close to those parts from that camera view. So be careful. Now we go, that's fixed, and I can just go, if I'm not happy with the position of this bun now, I want to reset it. I can just go to pose mode and pose Cletransform A, and it will put it back to where it was, and same for this. Okay. So that's those two fixed up. You can see they look a little bit nicer now. Next up, this thing, this strap. Now, I could just sculpt this into position, just move it around with the brushes. But instead of that, what I may want to do is actually also give it a bone just so I can position it a little bit more easily. So I'll go back into the armature and go to edit mode. Turn transparency on again. And at this time, I'll probably extrude from this lower bone. I'm just going to extrude. Maybe it would be better to extrude out from the leg. We'll see. And I'll do what I did before, which is disconnecting the bone. No, it looks like you know, if you extrude from the top or the bone, it will get parented to the bone above it, and it will be disconnected, or at the very least, maybe just inherited the disconnection from the parent I extruded it from. I'm not sure. But you can see that I didn't need to disconnect anything because it was already disconnected. Again, I'm not an expert on rigging and making bones, but I know enough of it to pose my models, and that's all I really care about. I am interested in learning a little bit more rigging, of course, if it lets me do more interesting things. But, you know, my career goals are still more to do with just making models and characters. So that's what I put most of my time into. And then this is mainly just so I can make core poses for my characters and call renders, right? So I've made this bone for that little belt. I'll go back into object mode, select the armature and then the body, and then go into weight paint mode. And it's going to be kind of hard to weight this bone in this position. So actually, what I will do is reset the pose first. So I just need to select my armature, go to the rest position, and now I can weight paint it. So I'll select this new bone, and then I will go into Face select mode and select this strap and go to weight. I need to turn up my weight slider to one because the set weight value is dependent on what you have this slider for the brush set to. So I will set weight, and now I will also normalize all. So now this little snap is going to be entirely dependent on the pose of that bone. So if I select my armature again and go to the pose position, you can see that it's now following the pose of that bone. If I go into pose mode, I can, you know, rotate this around or move it wherever I need to. I could have also just disconnected this bone entirely or this object entirely, but I kind of want to keep it moving with the torso, it depends. You know, you can do either way. You can do what I did with the pulgon or you can do what I did with this bone. If you really want to, you can add multiple bones and then just pose this strap, you know, with that chain of bones. So that will let you wiggle it around a little bit, or you can just do that kind of stuff by sculpting and moving it around. Either option is fine. I find this to be a little bit faster. So let's see what's next. Uh, this strap is pretty much fixed. The pouches are pretty much fixed. I guess I need to fix this neck now. So I'll go ahead and do that. So for the neck, I'll go into weight paint mode. I need to select the armature and then the body. Go to wet paint, and I'll start by unmasking everything I have so far. And I need to Control click on well, let's see what bones the neckpiece is weighted to so far. So looking at the neckpiece and selecting a few bones around it. So you can see the torso bone. This is probably what I want to weight the entire neck to. I don't want to be moving around with the head because that's not what would happen, right? It's not attached to the head in any way, so it shouldn't move around when the head gets moved around unless the head is pushing on it. So the base of the neck piece is mostly weighted to the torso. And then it doesn't look like any weight has been applied to these neck bones, maybe a tiny bit around the back, but that doesn't seem to be changing too much. And then a lot of weight has been applied to the head, which isn't something I want. Now what I can do is just select the entire neckpiece and these ropes as well and the ends of the string as well. And this mouthpiece. I'll just set the weight to zero while I have the headpiece selected. Now, it's not always a good idea to paint in lower values because when you're painting in a lower value, Blender has to redistribute the weights to the other bones automatically, and it may end up getting redistributed in an unexpected way. So sometimes you need to watch out when you're painting in values that are lower. When you're painting in higher values, splendor doesn't have to figure anything out. It's just going to replace the weights that were there with the weights for the bone that you're currently painting. But with lower values, it has to sort of guess where those weights are going. But in this case, I'm thinking it's going to be fine. So I'm just going to try it and see what happens. So I'm going to set the weight and outset all of those weights to zero and also normalize all. So now, this should be looking a little bit better. And yeah, it looks like it's definitely fixed. So I don't really have to worry about that anymore. Let's see. Now I can move on to the mechanical arm, I guess, clean up the weights for that. So, in this case, what I'll be doing is, you know, just weighting all of the forearm parts and all of the upper arm parts to one bone. I don't want to be having multiple bone weights on any of these vertices for a hard surface part not to deform and bend in any way, all of the vertex values need to be set to a single bone. So I'm just going to set this upper arm bone. Now, the limbs have two bones to them because these are sort of like twist bones. That's what they're usually called. And if you twist your arm around your forearm and you look at it, you can see that it's sort of twisting in over itself. So if you only had one bone for the entire arm, you wouldn't be able to achieve this. You wouldn't actually be able to achieve the forearm twisting in on itself because there are two bones in the forearm and when you rotate your forearm, those bones sort of rotate around each other and you get a sort of twisting motion. So you need these extra bones to support that sort of twisting. It's just something that's done to improve deformation on limbs. Otherwise, all of the twisting is localized only at the elbow and the wrist and it can end up looking kind of bad. So that's why there are multiple bones for each arm and not just one. So I'm going to skin everything to the upper forearm. That's probably your best bet. Instead of skinning to the lower twist bone, you want to skin everything to the upper one. So I'm going to deselect everything I had selected up there with Alt A, and then I can select this forearm, and I can go and control click this upper arm bone and go to weights. I'll set my weight value to one, weights, set weight, and then weights, normalize all. Now there shouldn't be any twisting for this part. If I select some of the other bones, I can see that they're not skinned to the forearm at all, so that's good. Now, I need to decide whether I'm going to skin all of these parts to the lower arm or the upper arm. I think I'm going to skin them to the upper arm. So I'm going to select the upper arm bone, go back into face select mode and start selecting all of these. And I don't want to select this whole arm part because a lot of the chest is in here, so I don't want to select that. Just all of these parts from the joint. And I will set weight. Looks like I accidentally selected a face down there. Just going to shift click to deselect it and set the weight and normalize the weight. So now these parts should be looking a little bit more rigid. And I want to do the same for a lot of this lower arm as well. So what I'm going to do is I'll rotate this arm outwards a little bit, just so I can reach the armpit parts. I can't rotate the deformation bones, unfortunately, though. I can only rotate the rig bones. And I can't do that I can't hide or unhide them from the weight paint mode. So I'm going to skip on that for a moment. And instead, I'll just paint out the areas that I can reach right now. So I'm going to deselect everything and then just select the arm parts and very carefully, trying not to touch the body at all, start to paint these in the lower arm for now. Okay. So I'm being very careful not to touch anything over here, because then that will be a pain to fix later. Another thing I can do is just fill in selections like vertex selections with some lasso select. But the problem with this is it won't select back faces, as you can see, so, you know, that's not super useful because you'll have faces that are missing from your selection. So, I find it better to just very carefully paint these areas. Uh huh. You see I'm starting to touch the body there, so I'm going to undo. Even though I wasn't really visually touching it, it's still, you know, kind of got a little bit of weight there, so it's, you know, kind of annoying when that happens. And I really can't do any more of this area, and I kind of want to fix this because you can see that this part is getting indented because it probably has weights from the torsto there. So I'm going to go ahead and move this arm outwards a little bit, so I can fix that. So I'll select my armature, and now I can go ahead and unhide the arm bones. So I want to be able to keep this pose or return to it after I've moved it. So to do that, I can go to the action editor. So the action editor, you can find it by going to the dope sheet here. And it will usually open up like this. So if you press this little dropdown menu, under animation, you will find the dope sheet, and then in the dope sheet, you'll have another drop down menu that will have the action editor. And in the action editor, while you're in pose mode, if you hit the en key, you'll get this cider menu, and you'll have a pose library. And what you can do is you can create Pose assets. So if I unhide all of these and hit A, I can create a Pose asset. And you can find these pose assets in your pose library or in your asset library. So if you drag up another menu here, so when you see this little plus mark, it will drag up a new menu. I've already done this, so I don't need to, but drag up a second panel here. And in this drop down menu, you can find the asset browser and you'll find the pose you just made in here, and if you just click on it, it will apply to your model. So now I'm going to make a new pose with the arm outwards. And I want to turn IK stretch off so the arm doesn't stretch outwards. And I'll rotate the clavicle upwards a little bit as well. And I'll select all of the bones and create a pose asset. Now, if you have a camera in your scene, it will automatically make a preview of the asset. But let me do that maybe. So I'll just shift a and add a camera. I had a camera in this scene before. You remember, I set one up in the first chapter, but, you know, I'm re recording these chapters because I found a few issues with Accurig. So, you know, I've set up a new scene for this. That's why things look a little bit different. That's why the materials have different colors and stuff like that. It's just, you know, I have to re record some of this stuff, set stuff up all over again. That's why I don't have a camera anymore. That's why the colors on the model changed as well. So let's lock the camera to view and sort of move it in position. Like so. And I'm not exactly sure. Maybe if I hit the end key and you click these two little arrow icons, they will create a preview from the camera view. So there we go. And now if you just click on these poses with your rig selected. Let's see. If I go into pose mode under animation, and you click on these poses, it will switch between them. That's right. I'm not an expert on this. I've just recently started using the pose library, but, yeah, that's how it goes. I thought you could update your model, apply the poses from here. Oh, you can apply them from this menu. You just have to hit the Apply button. Right. Okay, so that's how you do all that. You have the asset browser opened up here, so you can see your poses. You can also see them in the animation tab and you create poses. Just with this menu here, you need to hit the en key or that little arrow to get this menu to pop up. And it's the same over here in the asset browser menu. There's a little arrow here or you can hit the key to open up this menu and update your preview, change the name, add a description, all that kind of stuff. So I'm not going to need the asset browser now, and the action editor is found under the dope sheet under the animation tab over here. So there you go. That's how you can switch between poses very easily. The other thing you could do is just make a keyframe for this different pose. So what I can do is have this pose, hit I, and insert a keyframe for location rotation. And now I can flick between these two different poses as well. And I can actually do this while weight painting, too. Now I'm going to go ahead and wet paint this stuff. So it's gonna be a lot easier to wet paint now. Hang on, let me just select some of these bones. And actually let me hide them. Now, I'll go ahead and wet paint 'cause I don't need those bones to paint the defamation bones. So I still need to be careful not to paint up some of the wrong bones here. But you can see I can still scrub the timeline and go between the two different poses. So I just want all of the mechanical arm parts to look solid so they're not bending and stuff like that. And it doesn't need to look perfect in this pose. It needs to look perfect in the actual pose I'm using for the final render. Okay. So just being very careful here. I can also turn on WY frame mode to see my Wirames. So I accidentally flick the camera around sometimes, you know, going between different applications to different camera controls, sometimes you forget and you use the wrong button. So sometimes this may be to do with having projected mode turned on, but you can see I'm sometimes catching some faces that I'm definitely not touching with the brush. So I'm going to switch to sphere mode instead. And maybe this will be a little bit more predictable. And also, I don't really need back faces right now, either. So I have front faces only turned on, and this will hopefully help with me accidentally hitting some of the wrong faces. So I'm going around the back here. And you see even just weighting a value to one here, is taking a little bit of time. There's a lot of other tricks to weight painting. You can do stuff with proxy meshes and all that kind of stuff. But like I said, it's a whole different line of work in its own, and it's not something I'm an expert on. So I'm going to go ahead and use a bit of blur brush over here in the p Now, I've just realized that I'm not sure which bone I'm weight painting to because I don't have any selected. I'm just going to control click around. That's correct. I definitely don't want this bone to have any weights around the armpit or up here, so I'm going to set the weight to zero and just paint these away. Or I don't want it to have any values in general, actually, so I'm just going to set the weight to zero and normalize everything. And now I'll go back to the other bone I was working. And, you know, this might be a good enough result for what I'm trying, so I put the pose back to where it was. And this looks fairly decent. Now, there's a little bit of clipping going on here because the arm is down and, you know, it's touching the body. So sometimes clipping is okay, and it doesn't ruin the shot, games have clipping in them all the time. So it's not a big deal, really. Um, I don't really want to fix this clipping with weight painting because, you know, if I just weight some of these bones to the arm, it's still going to be bending unnaturally. So that's probably a bad idea. Instead, what I'll do is I'll sculpt this away. Generally, games don't try and bother to fix this. It's just really hard and not worth it. If you really wanted to fix it, you would either figure out, you know, maybe some bone, they're called corrective bones or correction bones, I think. But basically, you know, they have a few sort of instructions scripted into them so they'll change their position depending on, you know, any number of things. Mainly the positions of upper bones. So you might have a corrective bone that's somewhere in the chest here. And when it reads the value that the arms are all the way down, it moves inwards a little bit to sort of help with that sort of clipping. I'm not sure if that would be something that's done, but, you know, you could use a corrective bone to fix something like this, but that would be something you would do for an actual rig that you're trying to put into a game. In this case, you know, that's not something worth setting up just for one pose, obviously. So I'm definitely not going to be trying to do something like that. I'll just be sculpting that issue away. So I just want this to look more or less correct and not have any major, you know, areas that look bad. And in general, I feel like this looks pretty okay right now. I'll head into object mode, and maybe I'll be able to see a bit better. Maybe there's a little bit of harsh defamation there. I'm not sure. I'll go back into way paint mode and use a bit of blood brush, maybe. Maybe it's fine. We'll see. So that's the arm probably finished up. Not 100% sure yet, but, you know, I'll leave it at that for now. Looks like my body's moved back a bit. Not sure what's going on there and why I'm not lining up with the knives yet, but it's probably because I switched poses back and forth. Maybe I had some transformation value in there that, you know, didn't carry over, I guess. So that's something I'll have to probably reposition these knives again. Or maybe the knives are moved out of position. Not 100% sure. I'll just move them back this way for now. It might be because I had to move the brake forwards. So I'll just move these knives back to where they were. Oops. I have to double check that they're perfect a little bit later, but right now, I just want them roughly in the right place. So I can move on to fixing the next thing, and that's this little pouch on the arm here. So I think what I'm going to do first with this pouch is weight it all to one bone, just so I don't have to correct this curve, you know, this part being rotated in a completely different direction of sculpting. So I'll go ahead and weight paint this first. So I'm going to select this upper arm bone. Or maybe this lower arm bone, actually, and then just hit L and set the weight and then normalize the weight and then do the same for this little bit down here. Probably could have done them both in one go. 67. 05 Fixing Deformations With Sculpting: Hello, and welcome to Chapter five of rigging and posing and all of that stuff. So in this chapter, I'm going to be doing a little bit of sculpting over the posed model in order to fix any of the deformations that might not be completely perfect. So when you're sculpting in these corrections to the body, it's probably a good idea to put these things into shape keys so you can undo and turn them on and off again. So just under the object data properties, as this little triangle with your objects selected, you can just add a shape key. And the first one that it adds is the basis shape key. That's like the rest position. That's why, you know, that's the mesh with no shape keys. So it doesn't have any options to it. You need to add a second one, and now you can slide between different values. So generally, I would suggest storing each part you do into a separate shape key so you can work on them individually and not have everything stuck in one shape key. So what I'll do is I'll head into sculpt mode now. So just with your object selected with it in its pose, not in the rest position, I just go on and head into sculpt mode. So if I set the value of key one to one and I start sculpting, so I'll get this grab brush and grab the shoulder. Now all of this stuff is inside of this shape key. So if I set this value to zero, you can see that all of the change I made disappears. I set it back to one, the change of the so I'll just undo what I did. So when you're working with shape keys and you're putting your sculpt into shape keys, you make a new shape key, and while you're working in it, you set its value to one. And any stuff you add to that shape key will be in, you know, while the value is set to one, you'll be adding to that shape key. So with the grab rush, that's probably what I'm going to be using the most. The other thing I'll want to do is set auto masking by topology, because I don't want to be grabbing parts of the forearm here. I just want to grab the parts of this pouch and move it out of the shoulder, out of the elbow. So I'm going to go ahead and start grabbing this and trying to pull it out. The other thing you can do is just like in Z brush, you can mask areas off. So if you scroll down a little bit, you will find a mask brush. So what I can do is I can mask off a little bit of this arm. And then if you press A, you'll get a little radial menu and you can grow mask. And it says shortcut for that is seven, so let me try that. It doesn't seem to be I guess I have to press A and then seven. So if I do this a bunch of times, I can mask off the entire forearm and it won't get in my way. There you go. And now I can try and grab the corner of this pouch. With the grab brush, of course, it doesn't want to grab it through the rest of the forearm. I think in this case, the easiest way to work with this will be to detach this pouch from the rest of the body. I'm going to go into Edit mode and just select the entire pouch with all of its different parts. I'm just using the key to select all of these connected parts and make sure I don't have anything else selected. I don't think I do I can hit Alt P. Or when you're just trying to detach a mesh, it's not Alt P, it's just P and then separate selection. And you can see that it still retains all of its skinning data. That's something that I don't think most other software does. It definitely doesn't work this way through MAX, so it's really nice to have this in blender. I feel like the way it retains skinning data, even though you can modify the topology quite heavily, is really nice in blender. I'm not sure if other software is that lenient when it comes to these things. So now this should be a little bit easier. Another thing I can do actually, is I can set the body to be trans proron and Maybe not. I'm not super sure about how the transparency modes work in blender. Okay, maybe this will work. And now I'm just going to try and pull this corner out from the inside of the elbow. This pouch is in kind of a tricky position. If this was actually a game character that had to be put into production, the rigging team would probably give you feedback and tell you to move it, rotate it around or put it on a different position on the arm or make it a little bit shorter. Because rigging this would kind of be a nightmare. In my case, you know, I already have this baked, so I don't really want to make it smaller, and I don't really want to reposition it either. So I'm just going to try and pull it out from inside of the elbow. But if you were trying to rig this as a game character, it would be a real nightmare, I feel like, having a pouch in this location, or you would just ignore it and you would let it clip through the arm, because that's common too in games. Nothing is perfect. Everything's kind of a bit of a shortcut and a bit of a trick. So, you know, don't you can ignore some clipping in your characters, I feel. Because it's unavoidable. Or you really have to compromise on your design, just to make sure that there's no clipping. And, you know, my opinion at least is that I would rather have a character that looks cool than a character with no clipping. So, you know, big shoulder pads and all sorts of kind of stuff like these pouches, you know, if you got rid of them, then you wouldn't have to worry about them clipping, but that wouldn't be very cool, would it? So sometimes it's better to compromise a little bit and have a little bit more clipping than to, you know, have a very boring character design that's very, you know, easy and safe when it comes to clipping. So the reason why I'm undoing so much is I really don't want to mangle the shape of this pouch when I'm moving it, and it's kind of tricky to, you know, not affect the entire shape of the object too much when you're trying to move it such a large distance. We have the sculpting brushes. Means see I've really stretched it out here, I'm going to try and move it downwards and hopefully get it to look a little bit more, you know, less deformed. Moving and reshaping, you know, parts to a very extreme extent can mess with your normal maps. So, you know, just be careful when it comes to this step. Don't move stuff around too much, make sure it doesn't get sort of very mangled and very messy. Try and keep stuff quite smooth. I'm not doing a great job of it here because this is kind of a tricky part to figure out. Because I sort of have to twist it around this elbow and it is not ideal. This may be something that's easier to do with a soft selection or something like that. What you can try doing is editing it in Edit mode. The issue is that it returns to its default position in edit mode. But if you go to the mature modifier and you press this on cage button or rather display modifying Edit mode button it will be displayed in edit mode. And if you turn on Ocage then it will also move your cage to that position. So this may make it a little bit easier to work with. So if I select these corner vertices, and I don't really like the way soft selection works in blender. It's not like a menu with its own options, but I think if you hit the S key, no, it's the C key, I believe. And it sort of just gives you a circle around your cursor. No, it's not the C key. It is a These soft selection options are right here. So if you click this little button, you will be in soft select mode. So if I move this around, you can see that the entire shoulder piece is moving around because it's in soft select. And you can adjust your fall off here. You can set it to connect it only, which might be something I want. And you can set the size of the soft select circle, I believe. Um if you just hit the GK while you have something selected or any transform at, you'll see that it moves the whole object around, and if you use a scroll wheel, you can affect the size of the circle. Now, if the circle is really big, it will go off screen and you won't be able to see it. And that's why I don't really like the way the soft select works here because it can get a little bit confusing. But yeah, there it is. Now I can try and move these vertices out of the elbow this way. So I'm going to hit G again and move them upwards a bit, and then try hitting R to rotate them back. That's not looking great. Maybe I need to select a few more faces or a few more edges or a few more vertices, I mean. And just try that again. So I'll move it this way a bit and then rotate it. Now, the center of rotation is actually where the original cage is. So the edit on cage thing isn't really perfect. It's not a perfect solution because all of your transformation pivot points will still be where the original cage is. So it's not great, but it gives me a little bit more control, and I feel like it's a little bit smoother than sculpting still. So, I'll just be using this to get the general shape right. And then I'll do a bit of sculpting to finalize this. So now I'll go into sculpt mode, and I'll make my brush pretty small. Now, my tablet, I'm not actually using the tablet for sculpting. I'm using my mouse, but it has a handy little scroll wheel that has a shortcut to the brush size on it. So that's how I'm adjusting my brush size easily. It depends on your setup. You might not have this. In that case, you will have to use the button keys to do this instead. But, yeah, I don't know why I said that. I guess I'm just bragging. But right now, I'm actually using my mouse. I don't think using a stylus, in this case or a touch screen is really going to help much for, you know, just repositioning parts. You definitely do need a touch tablet or, you know, some kind of drawing tablet to sculpt. You don't really need one with a screen, though. Um but for this stuff, I don't really need a tablet because I'm just moving stuff around. And in fact, the precision of a mouse is probably preferable. So I'm just really trying to even things out a bit and not have this be so lumpy. I think under display properties, viewport display, you can turn on your wireframe. So that make it easier to make sure that my topology is still even after moving all of this stuff around so much. Like this. So I kind of want to make sure that everything is a consistent thickness like it was before. I didn't end up squashing any parts down too much like right here. This part seems pretty squashed. And I can just adjust these by having a very small brush size and almost moving the vertices individually. See, this is pretty tricky. Imagine how much trickier it would be to get to behave this way purely with skinning, right? You'd probably have to add a few extra bones and, you know, figure out a bunch of stuff. It'd be really hard. Definitely not something I want to do. So that's why it's easier to just, you know, sculpt these things. I'm going to move this around into a shape that's not stretching it around so much, so it looks a little bit more hard surface. And I'll try to straighten this pouch out in general a little bit. A This is definitely the trickiest part of the sculpting I'm going to have to do just because, you know, this is such an awkward position. And this pouch, you know, fabric stuff is kind of, you know, it's a somewhat rigid object, right? It can't flex around too much. I can't have some of these parts getting very thin for no reason. I have to maintain a consistent size on a lot of these things. So it's a little bit tricky to get this to look consistent. Maybe I'll have this edge flexing upwards a little bit, because this pouch, you know, I don't want it to feel attached to the skin. It sort of has to hang freely on its own. I think this edge sort of got smoothed out a bit. I'm going to try and pull it up again. I mean, I'll have to check how this looks with the normal map applied to it. And maybe I want this entire thing to sort of bend downward, so I'll try and use a snake hook. A snake hook is a little bit better for bending stuff around, I find, like this. It's not perfect, of course. If you have it set to auto masking topology, it won't grab the vertices from the other parts of the pouch. Maybe something like this, and I'll just squash this end down. You could also rotate this around in edit mode, I suppose. But I think this turned out fine. I'll see. I don't want to mangle this around too much anymore. I'll see how this looks in Mamzet tool bag. And, um, oh, yeah, I was wondering if this shape key would get removed because I detached this object from the other, and it didn't, you know, if I feel like this is completely messed up, I can just get rid of this shape key. But hopefully, this is working quite well. So I'll see about that. Next step, I might try and sculpt the knuckles in a little bit because I feel like they don't look perfect to me. You know, auto rigging fingers is never going to be all that perfect. So I'm just going to use grab tool and sculpt in these knuckles a little bit, so I'll add a shape key for those and just start sculpting them in. I'm really not using the sculpt brushes. I'm just using the grab brush. And I just want to make this knuckle sort of come back and actually be pronounced because I feel like it got softened too much by acuig in the way that it bends over. And I'll move these inner parts of the fingers inwards a bit as well. Let me hide that knife because it's kind of getting in the way. I think the knives are over here. There we go. There's actually a little bit of clipping going on in this area. You might be tempted to use the relax brush. Let's see where it is. The smooth brush. I wouldn't recommend it because it will really spread your topology out with no regard to, you know, how close things are meant to be to each other. I'm not sure how bad the clipping is in this area. Let me turn on the wireframe view. So it looks like a few parts are clipping through each other. I'll try and just sort them out with the brush. I'll show you what the smooth brush will do. So, you know, I have no idea what this is doing to the actual topology. Everything will look super stretch out if you use a smooth brush for areas like this. So I wouldn't advise it. I would advise just carefully going in with the grab brush and moving stuff around, so it's not clipping through itself. This is, you know, the ends of the fingers or, you know, this area is pretty well hidden I doubt it would show up very much on renders. And a lot of this stuff that is clipping through itself is back faces that will be visible to the camera, and those bank faces won't render, of course, so they won't be too much of an issue. In part, this is due to the fact that this is an auto rig, which is always going to be a little bit sloppy. But the other fact is that the fingers have a lot of defamation to them, and, you know, you'll catch stuff like this a lot of the time. Especially with a more extreme pose like this. Even if you just do this pose with your hand, you'll see that, you know, a crease of skin will usually appear. I don't know what your hands look like, but for me, if I put my hands in this position, I sort of have a crease of skin in a similar area. And, you know, that's just how it is. This is a pretty extreme position for these fingers. So, you know, for an auto skin, this is a pretty good result, regardless. I can't really tell what's going on here if I am honest. Okay. I think I know what this is. I'll move this bump down a little bit. And I'll try and get these edge loops in line. Yeah, the best advice I can give for situations like this, firstly, is check if it's actually going to be visible in any way. In your render, this probably won't can cover this up with a knife. It's in between the fingers, so I don't think anyone's going to see it. And then just pay attention to the edge loops. Like, I can see one right here and sort of move things in line according to those edge loops. So again, very extreme defamation in this area, so it's kind of to be expected. But if I just move the loops around a little bit, I think I can alleviate this. You know, I'm not 100% sure if this is worth fixing at all because if it's not visible, then it's not something worth doing. But I'm going to try anyway. So let's see. So there we go. It's almost fixed. And that's basically fixed, I think. I can move some of these edges upwards like that to sort of be closer to what a glove would be doing. You just have to be careful in places like this. You know, you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to make stuff look very wobbly, very mangled around. Okay, it took me a while to figure out what was going on here, but I found I figured it out in the end. And that sort of defamation has been fixed. Clipping like this around fingers actually kind of helps because, you know, if you bend your gloves like that, they will sort of press up against each other, and this can sort of help mimic that. That's frequently done for lower polymodels. And, you know, there's not a great way to fix it. I think the position of these things needs to be adjusted a little bit. I'm not sure if maybe they didn't get the pose trend. The pose swapping messed this up a little bit, or what? Or maybe I just post them this way. I can't remember, but I definitely need to adjust the position of that finger a little bit. I'll work on these knuckles a little bit more, try and bring them back. But I think that's going to be good. Don't want to overdo it. You don't want to have huge knuckles, because that tends to look a bit weird. It's very easy to overdo these things. Okay. Uh, I think that'll do. Maybe I want to move this thing to the side a bit because it's kind of looking a bit, you know, twisted around. I'm going to turn off by topology so I can move the entire thing. I just want to make this look separate from the arm because the arm is twisting, but the glove shouldn't be really twisting with it up here because it's not connected to the arm. So I'm just going to try and straighten this out. This is kind of a nick nitpicky thing, not strictly necessary to do, I don't think. Okay, that's fine. Let me take a look at the other glove. I'll put both of the gloves into this shape key. So let's see what's going on. I think the position of the tips of the fingers is messed up again here. Again, uh, because I've backtracked here. I've actually redone this a few times and re exported the curig just while I was testing the face normals. So maybe this is something that got messed up when I was re exporting the models. That's possible. That might be, what's happening here. With some of these fingers being rotated the wrong way, I'm not 100% sure, but I can't really think of anything else. But you probably won't have that issue. This is more just me having to mess around and test stuff after, you know, I caught this issue very late the thing with Auri. Okay, so that'll be all for this shape key. I'll add another one, and I'll set this value to one, and I'll start moving this end of the cloth out because right now it's bending with the leg and that doesn't look great. So I'll use the grab brush sort of grab it and move it to where it looks more free hanging. You could also do this with the weight painting, set its weight to one and parent it to the torso bone instead of the leg bone, and that might help get it into a better position than it is right now. But I'm just going to jump in straight with the grab brush and start moving it around. If you were to pose without doing any alter rigging or rigging in general, the posing process would look like this. Blender does have a pose brush that seems to work. So I've selected the pose brush now. I'm just going to show how it works. I don't really use it, though, because I find just making an auto rig works a little bit better than trying to use the pose brush. But you sort of need to that line is blender predicting where your limb is. And if you scale up your brush to sort of encompass the whole limb you can sort of, you know, select the the entire limb and start to pose it. But you can see it's well, you would have to do this one limb at a time, and you wouldn't have all of those nice IK handles and stuff like that. So it'd be a little bit tricky. I don't think there's any inverse kinematics with the pose brush. So yeah, I feel like using Acuig to get a good base and to have something that you can pose with normal posing tools works a little bit better than just using a pose brush because it's very quick to get something out of ancig even if I have to do a little bit of correction afterwards, as opposed to just doing everything from scratch. That's my opinion. So I'm just going to carry on straightening out this cloth a bit to make it look more like it's, you know, not getting deformed right with the leg. So I'm going to bring this part that's risen upwards, down a bit. And I'll move this corner up a bit as well to make this a little bit more of a right angle. Hopefully this label hasn't been squashed too much, it seems to have bent inwards a little bit here as well, so I'll just bring that up. I think I'll do the belts in another shape key. I'll add another one and set its value to one. You can also key the values of shape keys, but that's not relevant to what I'm doing right now. This belt has shifted down once I feel a bit when I was posing it. I will turn off topology and just actually, I do want topology a little bit. I'll mask off the pants underneath it. I'll just put a little dab of mask there and I'll grow this mask out. And I'll mask the stereo as well. And now I should be able to just move this up a little bit so it doesn't look like it's bending down the middle so much. I want it to look like it's above the surface of the pens, not connected. So I think that's helped a little bit. I'll move this corner up a little bit as well. I need to redo the top of the pouch here as well. This is something that I showed you to correct before you did any rigging in the first rigging chapter. But like I said, when I was experimenting with Acuric and troubleshooting that issue with the vertex normals, I had to redo a lot of this stuff just while I was trying to figure out what was going on, and I ended up forgetting that step earlier. So I'll just do it right now with the sculpt brush. I guess it doesn't really make a difference when you do this step. You could do it before, you could do it after. I'm basically just doing the same thing. So, you know, maybe it is actually better to do it right now than before you start rigging. I don't think it actually makes a difference, though. So I think that's that fixed. I can't remember if there was another clipping issue. Okay, I'll add another shape key for the elbow. And I will unmask the elbow now. So of course, Acurik hasn't done a great job of throwing out the deformation of the elbow. Mm. I just trying to use the brush there and it wouldn't work, and that's because I have my key value set to zero. You want to set to one whenever you're trying to do something. I'm just going to try and move this elbow to a more natural position right now, it's just bend it off roundly and that looks really bad. You can see how extreme this position is. Although I put a lot of topology into this area. It's actually ended up looking not dense enough once the arm is bent all the way to a 90 degree angle. So in hindsight, maybe I could have added even more edge loops to this area. But another issue is just that, you know, they're not deforming correctly, they're not being distributed correctly. If you were to skin this properly, even the same amount of topology would probably do a slightly better job. But, you know, I can compensate for that by just doing a little bit more sculpting and moving some of these loops closer to the elbow. So you should definitely have the wireframe view turned on when you're doing this because otherwise you can't really tell which polygons you're moving where and how much you squashed or stretched some of the topology. Also, having a iframe view visible will help you tell where stuff is meant to be, right? Because I can see the main elbow loops. So I can tell that those ones are meant to be the ones that stick out the most. Otherwise, you know, you don't know which topology exactly you're dragging around. Another thing that might help you is to apply the actual baked textures from the material. In this case, I didn't do it because there's actually not that much detail in this area because it's, you know, a cloth arm sleeve that goes over the actual elbow. I can't see the actual elbow in this on any of the bags. It's just not there. That detail is kind of covered up and smoothed out by the cloth. So that wouldn't have been very helpful to me. But if you're doing a different character that isn't wearing anything on the elbows or maybe has some sort of more distinctly visible elbow, even if they are wearing something, then having the textures applied, whether it's a normal map or an ambient occlusion map that's been baked out will help you see what you're doing. You don't want to treat this like sculpting the high poly, right? You're just basically trying to move the vertices into the right position. Honestly, this isn't really sculpting at all. It's just, you know, instead of having to move every single vertex individually or having to use soft selex tools to move this stuff around, I'm using the grab brush because it makes it a little bit easier. And then at this specific point, I think this is the only time I actually use one of the other brushes just to sort of sculpt in the bulge that happens when you fold your arm this way. You know, those muscles sort of squash outwards in this area. So I wanted to sculpt that in. But don't try and sculpt in every single detail into your low poly because a lot of this is in the normal map, and also there's only so much you can do at this stage, right? Skin characters or real time characters aren't that advanced yet. So this isn't something you should worry about too much. Just get it looking more or less correct. So I think I'm getting the shape of the elbow pretty correct here, especially if I zoom out a little bit. I don't see anything too wrong with this, so I think I'm going to stick with this, maybe just move a few of these things around a bit. Again, it's a little bit rough. In an ideal situation, I would have one or two extra edge loops in this area. But for me, it's a little bit too late in the process to go back and add these. So I'm just going to go with this, and I think it is good enough, even with that slight flow. So in your case, if you really want to, you could go back and edit it, but something like this is a good enough result, especially when the arm is bent at this angle. You will see even on very high end characters, once they start getting into more extreme poses, you might see a little bit of faceting if you pause, you know, freeze frame and take a very close look at it. In motion, you never see these things, so it's really not a problem. What I'm doing now is I'm just straightening up the way the crease in the arm intersects. It's fairly common for, you know, parts of the arm or parts of the knee to intersect with each other when you have your arm bent up this way. It actually helps provide the impression that the skin is pressing up against itself on both sides. So it actually ends up looking fairly good. It just helps if you try and make that line look nice and straight and not like a zigzag. So if it has ended up looking like a zigzag for you, just go ahead and wiggle the vertices around until it more or less looks straight. And that's pretty much all for the sculpting. I'll clean up this sleeve area so there's not that wide sort of thick looking edge at the bottom there. So I'll just press it up a little bit closer to the body. And aside from that, I don't think there's too much more sculpting I can do, but there are a few things still left to correct that little hard surface detail that goes on these belts here, and I also still have to pose the cape and have it nice and billowing in the wind. So that's pretty much going to be all for this chapter. I'll finish cleaning up the width of this sleeve hole. Make sure it's a consistent distance away from the actual skin of the shoulder and not all over the place. And in areas where it looks a little bit more jagged, I will try and move it inwards a bit, so you can't see that faceting that much. And, yeah, that's pretty much all there is to the sculpting part of getting your posed model to look as nice set as it can without having to actually do some proper skinning and stuff like that. So that's going to be all for this chapter. Thanks for watching. 68. 06 Posing The Cape: And welcome to Chapter six of posing. So there are just a few things I need to finish up before this pose is completely done and cleaned up for all of the weird deformations and stuff like that. So first thing I'm going to tackle is all of these little hard surface parts that are on the shoulder belt. So right now because they're skinned to the rest of their body, they're slightly being stretched around, and that's making them not look very hard surface. So I'm going to do what I did for some of the other hard surface parts, which is just detach them from the armature completely and then just parent them to a bone as an object instead of actually doing any weight painting to them. So I separated these parts off from the rest of the body and deleted the armature modifier from them. Now I'm going to put the rest of the body into the rest position. So just go to the mature tab and set it to rest position like so. And now I can just select these parts, select the rest of the body, go into pose mode, turn on X ray view so I can see the actual bones, and I'll select the main torso bone and hit Control P and parent to bone, just like the other parts. And now, if I put it back into pose mode, it's sort of following along with the body, but it's not exactly in the position I want it, but that's okay because I'm still able to freely move it around wherever I need it to go. So just object mode, I'm just going to grab it and move it up a little bit closer to where the belts are. And once it's close enough, then I'll just go into sculpting mode and move the belts so that they're actually holding onto all of the buckle holes and stuff like that of these hard surface parts. So I've moved it up a little bit, rotated around a bit, just so it's close enough so I don't have to do too much sculpting. I'm going to take a good look round and make sure it's definitely in the exact position that I want it from all angles so that nothing wrong pops up later on. And once I'm sure, I'll head into sculpt mode, and I'll move this belt, so it better wraps around the ends of the buckle and plugs into the back of that plastic piece a little bit better, as well. So, luckily, I did a pretty good job of getting this into the right position. So I don't have to move stuff around too much. It's very minor amount of sculpting I have to do. Just using the grabs brush to move stuff around and make sure that loop neatly wraps around the end of the buckle, doesn't clip into it too much, and also isn't spread out too much either. So this is starting to look pretty good. And I just want to make sure that it hasn't opened up towards the back of it over there, and I need to make sure that the little label is still clipped into the surface so that I can't see it hovering above the belt or anything like that. And for this belt the plugs into the back, there wasn't even really that much I had to do. So that's this part pretty much done. So now that I'm done with that, I can move on to posing the cape. Now, what I can use is what I've been using all the way up until now, which is just the grab brush, and you can see that this works fairly well. If I grab and drag the cloth around, you know, it is moving with the brush, and it's doing a pretty good job, but it's not maintaining a consistent width. So it doesn't really look like the cloth is actually, you know, a solid piece of fabric. It kind of looks stretchy or that it doesn't have a consistent volume. So just using the grab brush might be a little bit tricky for posing the cloth. And there is actually a really cool cloth simulation brush within blender that might be more fun to use. So if you scroll down a bit, you can find the cloth simulation brush. And if I try to use that, it's a little bit slower, but you can see that it's actually simulating this cloth, and it's behaving really physically accurately. So there's a drop down menu that contains all of the different brush options. I found that dynamic simulation area works best, as well as grab for the defamation mode. Right now I'm trying to use SnakeHook, but it's not really behaving the way I want it to. The other issue is that the simulation is pretty slow here. So what I'm going to try and do is detach the cape from the rest of the body, and that will hopefully speed things up because there will be less vertices of the model for, you know, the cloth simulation brush to consider in its simulation. So I think that's a good idea. Separate your cape or whatever cloth part you want to simulate with the cloth brush off to a separate object. And that will also help with, you know, accidentally selecting part of the body and moving around with a cloth brush instead of just the cape. So yeah, split off your cape. I'm going to go ahead and set the brush mode back to grab instead of SnakeHook because I tried the snake hook, and, you know, it just wasn't doing anything useful for me. I could barely get it to work. Not sure what's going on there, but grab was working perfectly fine before. The other options didn't really seem useful or relevant to this use case, so there's not too much reason to play with them. If you scroll down a few places below the cloth brush, you'll find the masking brush. This behaves pretty similarly to Z brush. If you just select it and then drag over some vertices, they will be masked off and they won't move around. And this is useful for having the top of the cape be rooted behind the hood like it's meant to be. And now just using the cloth simulation brush with its set to the grab defamation mode. It's really behaving like a piece of cloth, and it's looking pretty good when I drag it around. Now, there is still a bit of an issue with posing your cloth this way, and you'll see that if I move it around a little bit more, the back faces will start to clip through the front faces, and some of the corners will sort of get messed up. You can sort of see the lines where the back faces are starting to clip through the front ones. So that's not ideal, of course. You don't really want that on your final posed model. I'll look pretty bad. So I'm going to undo everything I did and luckily, there is a fix to this that will work perfectly well and actually improve the way the cloth is being deformed, too. So I'm going to duplicate the cloth, and I'm going to use this as a proxy mesh. So I'm going to do all of the cloth simulation on this duplicate copy, and I'll have it be constrained. I'll have the actual cloth constrained to this using a modifier. So the first thing I want to do with this proxy mesh is simplify a lot. I want it to be single sided, so I'm going to delete all of the back faces. So in edit mode, with all the faces selected, in face mode, there is a tries to quads option, and that will detriangulate the entire mesh that I have selected. Now, it doesn't do a perfect job. It's kind of guessing where the quads used to be. So around the corners, you will notice that it's still triangulated or it's detriangulated in the wrong direction. But this is good enough for me to be able to make very quick and easy edge selection so I can select around the entire edge and delete all of these edge faces. And that'll let me just select the entire backside and delete it in one go as well. So I'm just going around and deleting all of these faces around the edge. The X key is the shortcut for delete. That's kind of a blender quirk. It likes to use some odd shortcuts sometimes. Instead of the delete key, it uses the X key for deleting stuff, and you have a few different options on what you want to delete. In this case, I'm just deleting faces, so I hit X, and I select the face option when it asks me what I want to delete exactly. So with all of those side faces deleted, I can just select the entire back just using L to select everything connected. And now this is single sided. And it looks like there's one stray little triangle that I've left there, so I'll go ahead and delete that. Now, it's nice that it's single sided. That's already going to help me use this as a proxy mesh, but I'm also going to go ahead and simplify it even more. So I'm going to delete all of these extra triangles from the bottom, and I will delete a few of the vertical edge loops just so it's slightly lower poly and that'll make it deform better. That'll make the cloth simulation run faster on it. And the lower poly this is, the smoother, the result will be on the actual cape mesh that is copying the transforms from this mesh because the lower polycot will sort of let it interpolate from this one, and it'll be a little bit smooth, a little bit smoother than if you sort of wiggle stuff around on a higher polymodel With the cloth modifier, it'll introduce more sort of jittering and stuff like that. So I'm just going through making selections of all of these edges and deleting. And to select an edge loop, you just Alt click. And yeah, this has gotten rid of a lot of the edge loops. I'm just left with three down the middle now. And you can see they're not very evenly spaced, so I'm going to go ahead and use the edge slide tool to evenly space them as well. So if you go onto this menu on the side, you'll find the edge slide tool. And if you select a selection of vertices, you can use that little handle to drag them back and forth. Now, I don't find this as convenient as just edge constraints in three DMX, but it saves me from having to go back and forth between TDS Max and blender. So I'm going to use this tool to more or less get these edge loops to be evenly spaced. Basically, what you want from a proxy mesh, in this case, is for it to be slightly lower poly single sided, and even quads. So that's what I'm going to try and do. The other way you can go about making this proxy mesh is instead of trying to make it out of the original mesh by deleting faces and moving stuff around. You could just re topologize the low poly again and, you know, just conform a plane to it and give it a few edge loops and make it that way. That might even be quicker. I'm not too great at topo in blender. I find it a little bit annoying to set up, so I just decided to do it this way. But if you're familiar, if you can do it quickly, then just do that do whatever is fastest. The way you make this doesn't matter. It just matters that you have a very evenly spaced and slightly lower poly single sided mesh. This is going to work great. What I'm going to do now is go back to object mode and select my original cape. So this is the one that I didn't affect at all. It's just detached from the main body. And now, in the modifiers panel, I'm going to go over to the deform column, and there is a surface deform modifier. That's the one you want, not the mesh deform one that is a little bit higher up, so make sure you are using the surface to form. And then as a target, pick the proxy mesh and make sure you click bind. And when you click bind, make sure it says unbind afterwards because I found that button to be not very responsive and sometimes you click it and it doesn't actually bind the mesh. So make sure it says unbind after you click on the bind button. And now the low poly will sort of be bound to the proxy mesh. And as I use the cloth simulation brush on the proxy mesh, the actual low polly or the actual cape comes along with it. And this won't have the back faces clipping through the front faces. And the reason why is basically the front and the back faces will both be constrained to the same vertex on the proxy mesh. So, you know, they will maintain an even distance from each other, and you'll have less issues of the mesh getting messed up because all of the deformations are actually occurring on a lower polymsh and a higher poly is just following around with it. So now I'm going to go ahead and use the cloth simulation brush to pose the proxy mesh, and in turn, that proxy mesh will pose the actual low poly that I want to pose. So what I'm going to be doing a lot here is snapping to the front view just to make sure you know, just to check how this looks from the front. Now, I do have the actual concept up on another screen, and I actually like the way it looks in the concept, so I'm trying to match that. Sort of have the cloth off to one side and bewing this way. But what I'm looking out for from the front view is that I can sort of tell what shape the cloth is and that the arm isn't blocking it too much, and it's sort of not messing up the silhouette in the arm. So the sorts of things you want to look out for is the bottom of the cloth, lining up with the bottom of the elbow or any other line you can see on the body. Stuff like that is generally avoided when it comes to composition. You don't want stuff like tangents and things being parallel, really, because that can look kind of odd. You can see right now the cloth silhouette is sort of blending into the rest of the body, and that's not something I really want. And the other thing I want to make sure of is that you can tell what shape the cloth is because if the cloth is largely covered up by the arm and also it's been posed in a kind of strange way where you can't see the bottom end of the cloth, then it can be hard to tell exactly what's going on there and what shape it's taking on. So that's what you want to look out for when you're posing stuff like cloth. Make it, you know, more clear and make it kind of obvious what shape the cloth is taking on, what's happening to it. So I want to make sure that these two bottom corners of the cape are more or less visible from the front view, which is going to be my main, you know, render view. So I want the two bottom corners to be visible just so that people can tell that this is a rectangular piece of cloth from first glance, because if one of the corners aren't visible or if both of the corners aren't visible from the front view, then you don't really know what kind of shape this is. You just know that it's just some sort of cloth that's moving around back there. But if both of the ends are visible, both of those corners, then immediately the viewer knows that this is rectangular. So it's less confusing and immediately makes more sense. I also want to make sure that sort of the billowing fold here, where it sort of goes down and back up again, isn't lining up too much with the arm or isn't too covered up by the arm because also that as well, if it's lined up with the arm, then it sort of blends into the shape of the arm. And if it's covered up by the arm, then you can't exactly tell what's going on there. So I'm trying to make sure that that sort of billowing fold is mostly visible and also it's not lining up with the actual arm too much. So it sort of separates out and looks a little bit more distinct. This is something to play around with and, you know, spend a few minutes on. I find the cloth brush actually to be pretty fun. Zbrush tried to add a similar cloth simulation feature to ZBrush, but, you know, I found that it doesn't work nearly as well as lenders. I think, you know, also the ability to add these surface deform modifiers and stuff makes it a little bit more useful as well. I think it's more of a useful feature in an actual modeling package than it is in ZBrush, which is just a sculpting package. So I was a little bit disappointed by that feature. In Z brush. But when I've tried it in blender, I found that it's actually really useful for an application like this, and, you know, I might try and integrate it more into other stuff that I'm doing. So definitely play around with a cloth brush. It seems really cool and powerful. I'm starting to be pretty happy with the final position of this. Don't make it too complicated when it comes to posing cloth. Try and keep it to fairly simple sweeping curves because if you jumble it up too much, firstly, you'll need a lot more polygons. You can see right here that this is actually starting to look fairly angular, even with just these two curves in it. And this is actually something I'm going to have to fix. I'm not very happy with how angular it looks there. So I'm going to have to go back to the low poly model and adjust this. If I take a look at the wireframe view, you can see that there's just not enough polygons to cover those kinds of curves in the low poly. So I'm back in three D Max, where I made my retpper mesh, and I'm back here just because I have a nicely quadrangulated model, and I can just export this out again and rebake it once I'm done. So I'm just going to go ahead with the Swift loop tool and add a few extra edge loops and space them out accordingly so that, you know, I increase the poly coount here, but it's still nice and even between every single quad. And I'm taking a look at blender here just so I can see which areas need the most edges added, so I'm not putting in extra work in areas that are, you know, smooth enough already. So when you're doing this, make sure you have preserve UVs turned on if you're sliding edges up and down because that's what I'm doing. I'm adding an extra swift loop, and then I'm moving the surrounding edges around to sort of space stuff out evenly. If you have preserved UVs turned off, you'll see that moving an edge up and down will completely warp and mess up your UVs. If you have it turned on, then you can freely slide edges up and down, and it won't actually affect your UVs too much. Some moves will affect the UV map a little bit. So the preserved UVs tool or tick box isn't perfect. But most of the time, if you're just doing simple stuff like sliding edge loops up and down, it does a great job. So you definitely want to make sure that you have that turned on when you're making these adjustments. So I'm just shaking back here again, just to see that I'm adding the edges in the right place. And I just want to see how high up I need to go with these extra edge loops. So I think I need another one up here, and at this point, it should be good enough. So I'm just going to add that edge and space stuff out accordingly. And now I can go ahead and export this. So I'm going to export this separately to a separate FBX file, and then I will import it back into the umset scene where I baked the entire body, and I'm just going to swap out this single specific part for the Cape part baking group in the Mum set file. So once it's exported, I can head into Mum's toolbg now. And I'm just going to set this to draft quality because this scene is very high poly, very heavy, so it's really tanking my FPS. And I want the recording to be smooth, of course. So I'm going to go ahead and find the baking group for the cloth, and I'll close all of the other baking groups so they don't get in the way. I don't want to change those at all. All I want to do is swap out the baking group for the cake. So I've imported the fixed low poly of the cape right here, and I need to drag it where the cape originally was in its baking group. So that's the only part I'm going to swap out. I'm going to leave everything else the same. That ensures that none of my other normal maps get messed up or anything like that. Now, if I look at this without actually doing any baking and just looking at the same normal map on the new updated low poly, it doesn't really look like I have any shading errors going on here. And that's because the cape is actually a fairly flat part, and the normals the vertex normals haven't really changed that much just for me adding extra edges. So I probably could get away without baking anything at all. I'm going to go ahead and bake this stuff over again anyway. Now, I didn't actually need to bake all of the other maps in this case. Just re baaking the normal map is fine because the other maps aren't really influenced by vertex normals at all. Ambient occlusion doesn't care about vertex normals and so on. But I kind of forgot about that and I baked all of them anyway. But just re baaking the normal map, and the object space normal map would have been good enough. So I skipped through the bake there, so you didn't see me waiting for it to finish baking. But here it is now. I'm just turning on the wireframe so I can double check that this is the updated mesh and not the original one. And if I take a look at it after baking, it basically looks the same. So it doesn't look like there were any normal shading errors, that were corrected, everything was fine from the very start. So that's great, but I already re baaked it, so it doesn't matter. Now I'm going to import this updated cape mesh into blender, and I'm going to set the character to the rest pose. Now here is where I realized that I did mess up a little bit. What I should have done is put all of the proxy mash sculpting and simulation into a shape key, like I did for all of the other sculpting stuff that I did before. Since I didn't store all of the simulation that I did to the proxy mesh in a shape key, I won't be able to undo it, and I won't be able to bind this updated mesh to the proxy mesh. So that's a little bit unfortunate. What I'm doing now is I'm just transferring the weights from the original cape to this new one. So same process as before. Just select both of them, go into weight paint mode and go through the transfer weights options and use the same options. And I'm going to apply an mature modifier to this new cape as well. And now, once I put the mature into the pose position, you can see that it follows along with the pose. But unfortunately, I won't be able to bind this properly to the proxy mesh because if I set up the surface deform modifier and I pick it as a target and then click bind, it won't move anywhere because the proxy mesh has already been moved. So it doesn't have any transforms that it can transfer over to the new mesh. So I'm going to have to redo the posing of the proxy mesh, that is quite annoying. And so I want to take this opportunity to warn you guys to do all of your sculpting, all of your simulation in a shape key, like I did for all of the other parts of the body instead of doing what I did, which is just sculpt on the proxy mesh. And then if I want to update my low poly, I have to redo all this because I can't get it to bind and move along with the proxy mesh anymore because a proxy mesh is moved out of position and it's not matching the position of the actual reimported low poly. So that's a little bit unfortunate, and I am going to have to redo that step. So I went ahead and redid it all off camera off screen because you don't need to see me pose the exact same object twice. I was just the exact same process as I showed you before. The only difference is this time, I did all of the changes within a shape key, like I showed you to do for the body parts that you're sculpting. So what you want to do is set the shape key's value to zero, so the proxy mesh is sitting in the same position as your reimported cape mesh. So turn the shape key down to zero. Now go to the reimported mesh and add the surface deform modifier and select the cape as a target and bind it. Now go back to the proxy mesh, and you can turn the value back up, and the reimported cape should follow along. Just make sure that the modifier's visibility is turned onto. And now you can see this looks a lot better. It's a lot smoother. And you can also go ahead and adjust its low poly whenever you want and repeat this process as many times as you want. As long as you store any changes you made to the proxy mesh inside a shape key and you can turn it on and off again, that works fine. You could also have multiple poses for the same piece of cloth by having multiple shape keys and then, you know, toggling whichever you want for whichever pose you have. So I found that this little zipper pull wasn't in the right position compared to the pose mesh. I think I detached this by accident from the rest of the low poly when I was detaching the buckles for the shoulder belt. I think this part was accidentally selected when I did that, and it got detached along with those things. So I'm not going to bother parenting this to anything or anything like that. I'm just going to go ahead and manually move it into position in edit mode, and that'll work just fine because I'm pretty sure that this is going to be my final pose. So I'm going to call this pose done for now, and that means it's pretty much ready for export, so I can just set it up in Mom Zi toolbg and take a look at it. But there is one more thing I want to do before I export this model out, and that is to clean up all of the materials that are applied to it. Because right now the issue is when blender imports something, if you have the same material applied to several different objects, Blender will just make a new material for every single object. It won't apply the same material to several different ones. I'm not sure if that's something that you can change in the import options, but, you know, it's not something I did, so I have to go through and clean up all of these materials. So if you take a look at that little panel to the left of the screen there, you can see that there is a little material ball icon, and that is where all of your material options in blender are. So if you just select an object and go into that panel, you'll see this little list of materials, and you can just click that minus button to delete any of those materials. So what I'm doing is I'm selecting a material and then I'm moving the color wheel around, giving each material a different color and checking if any of the colors on the model are changing when I do this. If they're not, then that means that material isn't assigned to anything and it isn't being used, and I can just delete it. So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm just going through the list of materials and deleting any that aren't being used. Now, you need to make sure that you are in the rendered viewpoint mode when you're doing this. So there's the fully rendered viewpoint mode, and there is the preview render mode, which is what I'm in now. And the preview mode is fairly fast, but it gives you a good representation of your actual materials. The viewpoint mode that I was in before that, where the model still looks like it has different colors and materials applied to it. That actually isn't showing the color of the material. It's just showing the color of the objects that are set to it. It's just something to, you know, so you can separate objects out and sort them. It's not the actual color of the materials. So you need to make sure that you are in at least the preview render viewport viewing mode when you're doing this. Otherwise, you won't see any of the changes to the material color that you're doing. So, yeah, I just have to go through this list and select every single material, check if it's applied to anything, and if it is, then that's fine, and I keep it and I just give it a slightly better name. If it's not being used by anything, I just click the little minus button that is on the side here and that deletes it. Now to add a material, like I need to do for the eyes here because right now they're sharing the body material. What I need to do is select all of the faces from the eyes, and you can do that in edit mode and then click the little Plus button to add a material slot to your object. So the plus button right here, and then you can click New and that will add a material to that slot and you can name and then give it a color so you can see that it's applied correctly. So I'm going to give this a blue color. And then to assign it to the faces, you just need to click the assign button, and that will assign that material to any faces you might have selected. So that's all of the materials sorted for the body, but I did split a few parts off from the body. Now, if I can, I want to reattach them to the body. But some of these I can't reattach to the body because they have transformations that have been applied to them, and if I join them to the body, those transformations will apply on top of the armature, and, you know, that won't work very well. So some of these I'm just going to leave separate, and that's absolutely fine because I just need this to look good for a pose, and I'm just going to export everything as an OBJ with no rigging. I'm just going to bake this pose into the mesh. So it's not going to be rigged in the final renders. It's just going to be pose, and that pose is going to be baked into the model. So it's fine if I keep these objects separate. And I'm just going to go through and clean up the materials applied to those objects separately from the body. So I'll just go through and delete anything that isn't being used on these objects. So I just need to add the cloth material to the cape. So I'm going to select the cape, and there is a little button here in the bottom left corner of this menu, and that will let you pick out a material from the rest of the scene and apply it to your object. And that should be all in terms of fixing the materials. One other thing just to clean up the scene a little bit here is I'm going to take the knife objects out of the collection folder that contains all of the rig stuff. Because I'm just going to keep that folder closed from now on because I don't need to access any of the rig elements anymore. And by having the knives out here, you know, I can just easily select them and export them or do whatever I want with them. So I'm going to select everything and export as an OBJ. You want to make sure that you have selected only turned on, export normals turned on, and apply modifiers turned on as well. All of those three settings are super important, as well as UV coordinates, of course, and the other things. So make sure all of those options are turned on and you can export. And this is that same model imported into MamosetTol Bank. So you can see that all of the normal maps and everything is functioning great. And the model looks good, aside from the really bad lighting, which is something I'm going to have to fix in future. So that's all there is to posing your model and fixing it up. Now I can move on to texturing, which is what I'm going to be doing in the next set of chapters. Thanks for watching. 69. 01 Blocking Out Part1: Hi, and welcome to the first chapter of texturing. One thing I need to do before starting texturing is to export this model out in the default pose in the A pose. Now, you don't have to do this if you didn't swap out any of the parts for something with a different topology. I went and increased the poly count on the cape. So that's really the only reason why I'm exporting this. If you didn't have to do anything like that, then you can just go ahead and use the model that you used for rigging as the model you're going to use in substance painter. Now, you could texture the posed model, but I feel like the Apose is easier to texture just because, you know, all of the limbs are spread out and it's easy to see everything you need. Whereas in this case, it might be tricky to texture some of these parts with the post model. So that's really the only reason why I'm resetting the pose for export. So I'm going to put the body in the rest position, and then for the cape, I'm going to go ahead to the modifiers panel and hide the surface deform modifier so that it is straightened out like this. And I can go ahead and just export this out and use it for texturing. So I'm just going to put this in a new folder specifically for texturing. And the same settings that I always use for exporting Obichs. Now, for setting up a new project in substance painter, I'll walk you through that. So you want to go to File and new, not open or anything like that. And the template for now, doesn't really matter, but you can just go for PBR metallic Roughness Alpha blend. So that'll give you a metallic channel, refs channel, and also an Alpha channel. So that one's pretty good. But I may change this on export. I think these have been updated in the new version of subsite painter, and I haven't gone through and checked them out, so you know, the template is you can adjust that anytime you want, so it doesn't really matter. Now, go ahead and under file, select your low poly model, the one I just exported. And for document resolution, I'm going to go with four K. And the normal map format, you may have to change this depending on how your normal maps look. I'm not sure what I had my normal map format set to in Mama set tool bag when I was baking. So, you know, if I apply my normal maps in substance painter and I see that they look wrong, I'll just go ahead into preferences and change this. You know, if you actually check what kind of normal maps you're baking in Waze Tolbag then you won't have any questions about this option. You'll either pick DirectX or OpenGL. The only difference between these two is the green channel is flipped, so this is something that's very easy to change at any time. I don't want to use the UV tile workflow because I haven't used UV tiles in the unwrap. UV tiles are something more for VFX and film assets, not for real time rendered assets. I'm not sure of any game engines that use UV tiles or UDIMs at the moment. You want to make sure that auto unwrap is not ticked on. Now, I think by default, it is actually turned on. So make sure this is turned off because if it's turned on, then substance painter will try and unwrap your models for you, and it will ruin, any of the UVs you already have, and you'll, you know, have to re import everything again. So make sure that's turned off. You also don't need to import cameras. Now, you do need to import baked maps because we've baked all of our maps in Mama's at Tolbag. You can bake maps straight in substance painter, but it's just not as good as MarmoseeTol bag. You don't get any of the control that Mam Z tool baag gives you. So that's why we bake in Mamas et tool baag and not in substance painter. So I'm going to go ahead and add all of the maps that I've baked out. So I'm just going to shift select this entire folder, and then I have a few more in this skin bake folder. Now, this is a bunch of textures, so it is going to be a bit of a chore to sort through all of these, but you only have to set them up once. For physical size, just use the meshes Internal unit scale. And for color management, so for color management, I will stick to the legacy one and linear. You can also go with some of these, and you'll just have to match them in Mama Zip toolbag if you want the resulting Mama zip toolbag to look the same as your viewpoint in substance painter. So if I head on over to Mama set tool Bag, and under the camera settings, there is a tone mapping option, and right now it's a linear. So that's the same as I had it set to in substance painter, but it also has ACs, which is another option in substance painter. I think ACS is becoming a little bit more common and the main thing that is used. But for now, I'll just keep them both at linear. I don't think there will be a huge difference, honestly. As long as you just match the color space between the two programs, if you have them set to different color spaces, then everything will look slightly different between the programs, which can be frustrating when you're working because you might have something looks good in substance painter, and then it looks washed out or too contrasting in Mam Zep toolbg. So you just want to make sure that these are the same. And yeah, that's all of the options you need. So just wait a second for it to import. And here it is imported. One of my zippers ended up a little bit detached from the body, but that's fine. It's not a big deal. So the whole model is here, I am missing the shoulder pad, though. I think, actually, that I accidentally deleted it at some point while I was posing the model. So I'm going to go and fix that in a moment. Okay, it wasn't deleted. It was just hidden, so I can go ahead and re export this. So it's actually a good thing that that happened because I can show you how to remport your mesh if you edit it. So if you just go down to the edit menu, there is a reimport mesh button. So if you just click that, that will reimport your mesh. And there is also under project configuration, you can select an entirely different file to import from if that's something you need to do. So it's almost good that that happened. I got to show you that option. Now, I will warn against relying on this too much. If you have a lot of brush strokes on your model and you reimport the model, they can get repositioned, they can get all messed up. In general, color ID masks will not be affected because those are based off of your ID map. So you can change the geometry all you want as long as you use the same ID map, those masks won't get affected, but actual brush strokes on the model. If you reimport the model and it is significantly different or sometimes it just happens. It's happened to me before randomly. Unless they've improved the actual way reimport works. I'm not sure. I haven't done this a lot with newer versions of substance painter. I tend to get my model right the first time around after I've really been set back a lot by reimporting the model before when I was still a bit more of a beginner. But yeah, in short, don't rely on reimporting the model too much. You want to almost make sure that you're pretty much done with all of the modeling. By the time you get to substance painter, it can be done in a pinch, but try not to rely on it because sometimes it can mess up the brush strokes on the model. And those are both brush strokes in paint layers and brush strokes for when you're painting in masks. So be a little bit wary of that. Don't use it too much. So the model is in substance painter now, and I can go ahead with texturing. But before I do that, I need to apply all of the different textures that I've baked to this model. So if you go over to the texture settings and you scroll down a bit, for each selected object, these are all of the different materials you have applied to the model. If you press this little I icon with the one in the middle, it will just focus on the selected item. So you can look at all of these one at a time. And if you scroll down under the texture set settings panel a little bit, you can find all of the different map slots. Now, the position and the thickness are applied automatically here. I'm not sure why. But what I need to do now is go ahead and find the textures that I imported. So they'll usually be somewhere in here in the texts panel. If you go to this little drop down menu here, you can go to the project section of the textures, and these will only be the textures that you have imported to this project. So you won't have all of the other stuff that just comes default with substance painter getting in the way. These are just the textures that are imported, so it'll be a little bit easier to sort through things here. And you just want to drag each one of these into its corresponding slot. So normal goes in the normal channel. WorldSpace normal is this normal map that is a little bit more colorful. So that goes into that slot than the ID map ambient occlusion. Now, I'm going to be using the ambient occlusion that doesn't have all of the extra objects baked into it. So it's the one that respects baking groups, basically, because I baked one that ignores baking groups and the other one that respects baking groups. So I'm going to use that one for my ambien occlusion that gets slotted in here, and then I'll use this other one sometimes if I need it for a specific mask on my material. But by default, I find that this one tends to be more useful, so that's why I'm going to keep it in the actual texture set setting slot. And then if I ever need some of that extra ambient occlusion, I will apply that specifically when I need it for a mask or a material that I'm working on. Next up, the curvature. So that goes there. And then the position map. And I don't have a thickness map or a height map or any of these remaining maps for this texture set, so I can ignore those. Now, if I zoom in on my model, you can see that the normals all look bad, but this is okay. There's nothing wrong here. All I have to do is go up to Edit project configuration and set my normal map format to open GL and click Okay. And everything's fixed. So it's just a matter of setting up the correct normal map format. And you can see all of these normals are good again. So if you actually go to Maze Tolbag and to the Baker options, I don't have any open here, but I'll just open up a new one just to show you that option. This little settings button next to the normals, and you can set to flip Y, and that will basically make your normal MP format to direct X functionally, and then you won't have to go and set up that setting in substance painter. I'll just will work properly out of the gate. But, you know, it doesn't make a difference. It's just one click to fix that option across the whole project, so it's not a big deal. Now I need to go ahead and do the same for every single other material here. So I'll probably just fast forward through this because I'm just plugging textures into their corresponding slots. Nothing too interesting going on here. A No, I don't need the ID map for this material because it's just one object, so there's no D I really need. Although I did bake one out, so I may as well plug it in, but I don't need one really. Now, the skin materials have a thickness map. This is going to be more relevant to the face, but I'll also plug it in for the arm. The height maps, even though I did bake them out, they aren't particularly useful. They're just something that's useful when you're making actually using displacement, so I won't plug that in. Now, instead of the curvature map, you may want to plug in the cavity map or something like that, because those tend to be more useful for faces with all of the poor detail. But for now, I'm just going to plug in the curvature, and you can always just select a different texture map whenever you're using, you know, applying all of the different options to a material or a mask you're applying to your model. So even though I did make out a bunch of extra maps here, like I have convexity and cavity for every single one of these materials, they don't have a slot in the mesh maps options here. That doesn't mean I won't be using them. I'll just be plugging them in manually to all of the masks and stuff wherever they are applicable. So in this case, I am just plugging in the curvature, but sometimes it may be more useful to plug in something like convexity or cavity. And the thickness map is mostly important to the face. So that's all of the texture maps plugged in. And you can see that it's all working just fine. You can see all of the normals and a little bit of the AO is applied to this model. So that looks great. And now I can actually move on to doing a little bit of the texturing. So what I like to do first is basically set up a very simple blockout. And the purpose of this is really only to sort of have folders and masks set up for every single material on the model. And all of these materials are actually just going to be placeholders. They're not going to be the final material or anything like that. I'll try and find a material that is close to what I need. But, you know, it's definitely not going to be the final thing. I mean, some of them might be good enough to make it into the final project, but really it's all just placeholders. So I'll go to all libraries, and I'll just browse through these and I'll find materials that are similar enough to be applied as a placeholder. So I'll put the concept up on screen here as well while I'm doing this just so I can sort of have a better idea of what I'm picking. Now, like I said, these are placeholders, so I'm just picking from all of the stuff that comes default with substance painter. Some of these you might not have. Some of these might be things that I have, you know, added over the years to my files in substance painter. So don't worry about that. If you're missing some of these, you don't have to match what I'm picking exactly. Just pick something that's close enough. Now, later on, I will be using substance source for some of the height maps and stuff like that that I will be applying to the final materials. Actually, I don't think it's called substance source anymore. Now, it's just Adobe substance three D assets. And this is just a library of a bunch of different materials. So a lot of these are scans and a lot of them are really good. Now, the problem is the thing I don't really like about substance source is that the only way to get access to it is to subscribe to a package of, I think, substance painter, substance designer, and substance stager all in one go. There's no option to just subscribe to substance source or just to buy some points, so you can just download whichever textures you want. So that's a little bit annoying. I think the cheapest option I can find for it is $20 a month or something like that, and you get three other softwares in that package. And I don't need two of those softwares at all. I don't use them, so it's a little bit annoying for me to have to get this package. But $20 a month isn't too expensive. So, you know, I think it's worth it in the end, even though that is a bit annoying. If you want to go for something that's completely three, you can go for Quicklemega scans. Quickslemega scans is free if you use it with your Epic Games account and you use it with Unreal Engine. The reason why I'm not using it, is because it's specifically only for use with Unreal Engine. Now, I think for a personal project, no one's really going to pay attention to where you got your textures from if it's just for a portfolio piece. But I'm not making a portfolio piece here. I'm making a tutorial that's going to be sold for profit. So technically, according to the license agreement, I shouldn't be using Quixel and mega scans assets for that. So that's why I'm not using it. But otherwise, you can get a bunch of textures that are very similar to what you have in substance three D assets through Quixle mega scans, and they are free you are sort of meant to use them with Unreal Engine four, though. So you know, but for personal projects, I don't think, you know, anyone's ever really cared about that. Or you can just decide to render your model in Unreal Engine four. Now, I won't be showing that. I'll be showing you how to render it in Mama E tool Bag. But if you want to, you can render things in Unreal Engine, and Unreal is a pretty great way to render your real time assets, as well. So I would say you can use QuicksaOmega scans as well for just some of these materials and textures that I'm going to be using if you don't want to pay for substance three E assets, or you don't want to use substance three D. Otherwise, there are a few other websites you can go through and get stuff from. Some of them are free, some of them are paid. Also, you can just browse ArtStation. And you can find a bunch of great materials there. Now, what you want to be looking for and what you want to be getting is mainly just height maps. Generally, you know, it's not a great look if you just take a material you bought and slap that on your model and you just use that for the final render. Firstly, you know, it's not going to be finished to the extent as fully customized material that you've built yourself. And secondly, you know, you're trying to show off your own skills, not the skills of whoever made the material. So really what I use bought assets from ArtStation or stuff I've downloaded from substance three D or Quicksil is mainly the height map for the fabric textures. So, you know, these, although you can generate them yourself, the best way generally is to use substance designer to make sort of procedural tiling patterns like this. What you can also do is actually just model in the weave textures yourself and then bake them down to a tiling map. But yeah, basically, the only part of materials that I've downloaded that I use is the height map and maybe the ambient occlusion map just for masking stuff out. And then I will build my material on top of that. So don't just take the materials you download and put them on your model, and that's that. You know, you pretty much want to build up your material from scratch and only use these parts for masks and stuff like that. And the only part I really care about is, you know, the texture of the fabric, the actual weave, because it's a little bit tedious to make these things. Yourself. You know, it takes a bit of time, and it takes a little bit of expertise in substance designer. In general, I think it's absolutely fine to use height maps that you've bought or downloaded for your characters, but don't use the whole material because, you know, you want to be showing off your own skills, the fact that you can make materials yourself, and you don't just want to be using someone else's work for your portfolio pieces. But before I actually start looking for textures online or from substance three D, I'm just going to apply some placeholders because with substance three D, you know, you have a limited number of downloads, so I don't want to be downloading stuff that I'm not going to be using. So I want to figure out what exactly I need before I start looking for stuff online. Because you can spend hours looking for materials that look great online and then realize that maybe that's not exactly what you needed, or maybe you put some stuff together yourself and you didn't need to download those things at all. So I'm going to go through and start putting together these placeholders. So I'll make a new folder. And in this folder, I think I'll put the belts. But before I do anything for that, I'll put in a sort of I guess it's what you would call, like a primer coat or something like that, if you were making a physical model. And this is sort of a layer that I put underneath everything just in case there are a little tiny gaps between the different masks I've set up between materials and elements. I like to put in a single fill layer of a sort of average color of the model that isn't too shiny and won't stand out if there's a tiny gap between masks or otherwise between materials. I don't want something to be, you know, a bright white shining through everything. So for this, I just set up sort of mid gray material or mid gray color. And I set the roughness to something quite dull, and I don't need any of the other channels, although it's a good idea to fill in all of the channels as a base because sometimes that helps with other materials that get layered on top. So it's good to have a flat value filling in every single one of your channels in general. So you want zero for the height, for sure. And all of these pretty much zeroed out. So that's sort of a layer I have beneath everything, and you can name this if you want. And then I'll start filling out some of these folders. So you can color code these to make it easier to see. So if you right click on the folder and press the red button, we'll turn the entire folder red. Now, I don't want this primal layer to actually be in the Belts folder, so I'm just going to select it and track it downwards, so it's not in that folder. And what I'll do is I'll add a add mask with color selection. And I'll add a material to this folder so that I can see what I've selected. I'll set it to a red color just so I can immediately see what's been selected by the color selection, and I'll start picking colors. So in this layer, I'm just going to have these two belts. So that's that done. And instead of just having a flat color, I can go through and find something that kind of looks like a belt material in here. So let's see. Now, you can use smart materials as well. But for placeholders, it's a little bit easier if you just keep things simple and just use these regular materials. So an artificial lever seems like it will work well for this belt. And maybe I'll just color pick the color from the drawing, do something a little bit lighter. Not that light, though. Maybe I'll color pick from the top one. And like I said, this is just a placeholder. I'm just setting up the folder structure basically for the whole texturing process so that I can easily just go through and start actually doing the materials instead of having to set up folders from scratch. So maybe I'll have material for the pouches next. And the pouches are made up of a bunch of different parts, and they have several different colors assigned to them, so you'll want to pick multiple colors for each part of the pouch that has the same material. And actually, for this pouch folder, I'm going to have multiple folders inside of that folder. So instead of a color selection layer, I will just add a black mask and I'll add a paint to that black mask. And I'll add a layer in here just to see what I'm selecting. So if I put a bright color on this, as soon as I mask an area off, I will be able to see that it has actually, you know, what's been selected. Because if I don't put any layers into this folder, I won't see what the mask is directly affecting. I'll sort of be guesswork. So it's a good idea to just put in a layer with a bright color just so you can see what you've selected for your mask while you're masking stuff off. So with this paint layer that is painting into the mask, I can go ahead to polygon fill and set it to mesh fill, and then just click on all the different meshes that make up the pouches. So these little buckles and parts, I think I'll include in a separate layer because they all sort of share a material, this kind of gold material. Now, you could say that these little loops on the top of the pouches also share the same material, but, you know, I'm not 100% sure, right? I feel like this is more of a golden fabric over here, and this is actually a gold metal. So I'll keep them separate, and I'll have these in a separate layer with all of the golden stuff like this little buckle. And, you know, stuff like that. This buckle here, and then I'll have the gold fabric in its own layer. And of course, I can always change these later if I decide I want to. So this is, like I said, just a rough blocking of all the different materials that I'm going to be having. So I have this main paint layer for the pouches set up. Now I can set up a sort of, you know, a layer within different materials within that. So I'll add another folder to these pouches. And this is where I'm going to start using the color selections. So I'll add a material to this folder, so I can see what I've color selected, and I'll start picking different colors. So this is going to be the main fabric body of the pouches, so the bottom half and the lid. So I'll call that pouch main. So this is the pouch main sub holder, and I'll add another one, and I'll call this pouch plastic. And this will be for these sort of plastic panels that go on top. So I'll add a layer to fill that, and I'll add add mask with color selection, and I'll color select these two parts. There you go. Time for another folder. I'll call this one pouch straps or pouch loops. Maybe that makes more sense. Again, adding a layer, adding a mask of color selection, and color selecting these two. I only have to color select one of them because they share a color. And actually, I think I'll have these two, and this has the same fabric, so I will color select that as well. So I'll just change the color on this. There we go. So I'll just rename this folder to pounce gold. Because that makes more sense for what it's ended up being. And I'm going to go ahead and add another folder for these straps. And I'll add another color selection mask. And I'll select both of the colors that make up the straps. I think I accidentally copied this by miss clicking somewhere. So let me redo that. Okay, now to replace some of these just flat materials with, you know, something that's actually immaterial, something that has a little bit of texture to it. And just being very quick, just selecting something that roughly fits what I need. So maybe this one and I'll change the scale up. Now, the reason why I'm actually putting a little bit of time into making these materials look like what they do in concept. You know, I'm picking out something with a little bit of texture to it with, you know, some sort of normal value and stuff like that is because, you know, as I'm working along, it's going to be a little bit more jarring if, you know, when I check on the model, see how it looks in Mom's tool bag or in general, while I'm working on the model, if I just have big bright white patches or patches of, you know, multiclored materials on the model, it's not going to give me a good impression of how the whole model looks. So it's better to have these sort of blockings, these placeholders of stuff that roughly looks correct, right? It's not the final material. It's not as nice as it will look in the final material, but at least it's the same color. It's a similar roughness value, and it's a similar texture. Don't want to have random colors all over the model because it won't give me a good impression of what the final thing will look like. So I'll turn down the height range a little bit, and I'll put the scale up to maybe six. Okay, so this obviously isn't going to be the final material I pick for these, but it's something. Now you can see around here this sort of aliasing around the edges, that's an unfortunate issue with color selection masks. And the only way to really solve that is to add a blur. So if I add a filter onto the mask, so I've gone to the folders mask section, and I've added a filter here, and I'm picking the blur filter. And if I really turn down the intensity, Actually, before I do that, before I add that blur filter, you also want to turn up the tolerance a little bit on the mask. And sometimes that's enough to fix it. Now you can see it's still a tiny bit jagged if I zoom in closely. So adding a very small blur amount helps with that. So less than 0.1 in this case. Maybe something like 0.05, something like that. Now, for some reason, I have some of the wrong things selected here in this mask. So let's go ahead and fix that. Okay. I see what's happened. So when I turned the tolerance up, this value, the color here is within the tolerance range of this part. So I'm going to have to go ahead and try seeing what it looks like when I turn down the tolerance a bit and seeing if I can get a good value that is, you know, doesn't cover this area yet, but doesn't also leave any aliasing here. And it looks like that's not possible. So what I'll do instead is just add a paint and set the color to black and just, you know, paint away any objects that are mistakenly selected. Now, you want to be careful because this is a mesh fill. So if I click on this area, it will fill this entire mesh. So instead, I'll just do a little bit of a mask select there. Okay, there we go. Now for the material that I've applied here, I could go through and maybe pick one of these. Okay, that's actually what I'll do. But for plastics, generally, you can just, you know, play with the roughness all a bit. And, you know, plastic is smooth and it doesn't have too much going on, so you can just apply Okay. That's that part done. Now I can move on to the gold parts of pouches. So luckily, there is a gold material right here that I can drag onto the material mode. And maybe I'll turn down the roughness on this a little bit. It looks like there's some shading issue going on here. I will have to check that out and maybe reimport the mesh. I'll see. But for now I'll leave it as is, and I'll continue with texturing. So moving on to the straps material. Let's see. Maybe this plastic cables braided will work well if I just turn up the scale a lot and set the colors to something grayish. Scale it up a little bit more, something like that, possibly. And I can see that one of these little things is getting selected as well. So I'll add a paint layer and just paint it away. Mm. And instead of using the brush to paint it away like last time, I will use the polygon fill and just fill this area in with a black value. Now, I actually mask off the inner part of the strap, as well. So put this in strap outer, and I'll add another mask of color selection, and I'll make another folder for strap inner. Uh huh. And I'll add another color selection to the inner part of the strap. And let's see what material do I want to put in there? Something random. It doesn't really matter. Drag this material in here and scale it up a bunch and color pick a similar color. Then we go close enough. And, I'll add one more material for these little nibs on the pouch. Now, these I'm going to have them as a sort of metal thing, and these areas are going to be sort of metallic fabrics. So that's why I'm going to have separate materials for these two parts. And I'll just drag in the gold pure material. Now it looks like I'm getting some of these other areas masked in as well, so I need to add a paint and just paint them away. And I think I'll use a UV chunk fill for these because these are in a different UV chunk. There we go. So that's the pouch is more or less done. Now I can move on to the next part. But I think I'll be doing that in the next chapter. So I've given an overview on how to set up your project file in substance painter and, you know, a little bit of a start on how you want to start setting up all of the different folders and materials in your substance painter file. I'll be doing more of the same in the next chapter just until I have the whole blocking done, and then I'll export it into Mom set tobag to take a look at how it's looking. So that'll be all for this chapter. Thanks for watching. 70. 02 Blocking Out Part2: Hello, and welcome to Chapter two of texturing. So I'm going to continue where I left off in the last chapter, doing the blocking of all of my different materials. Like I said before, the main purpose of this is to set up the folder structure and all of the different masks for where the different materials will go so that I don't have to do that in future chapters, and I can just start tweaking the materials to what I need them to be. So I'm just going to carry on doing what I was doing before. If I see that this is getting a little bit tedious, what I'll do is I'll fast forward through some of it and just do some commentary and post over it. But I want to keep the texturing chapters as real time as possible just because, you know, it's a little bit more interesting than the other stuff I was doing, and maybe there's more to talk about here. So some of this stuff has been sculpted on. Now, what I might do is actually go into blender and turn off the What are they called? And turn off the shape keys for the sculpted parts. That's something I forgot to do. So if I turn down all of the shape key sculpting, these will return to their original position. So I think I'll go ahead and do that now. So just under object data properties, I can go ahead and turn all of these down and let me reset the pose again. So you can see this is back where it was before, and I can go through and do this for all of the shape keys. So this little object has sort of been offset from where it would normally be. So what I can do is under transform, I can clear the No, I cannot because I reset the origin on this part. So maybe if I do this, let's see. No. Okay. So this part is just going to be in this new position pretty much permanently, I guess. There's nothing I can really do about this. I'll just roughly shift it into where it should be in the tipos, and it'll still be better than, you know, where it was before. If I was a little bit more careful, I could have put this transform into a shape key or if I didn't reset the origin, then just resetting the transforms would put it back to where it used to be. I guess I wasn't very careful, and I forgot to do that, and now I can't know, easily reset it to its original position in one click. But that's okay. It's not too big of a deal that's slightly out of position just for texturing. I'm going to go ahead and re export this and re import this into substance painter now. Actually, while I'm at it, Where did the zippers go? There is. Um let me see if I can reposition this one. Looks like I can't. But I think both of the zippers share the same UVs, so I only need to see one of them, really. So this will be fine. Tiny bit janky the way I did pay attention and, you know, reset the origins on that part, so I can't reposition it to where it used to be, but it'll be okay. So let me go ahead and re export this. I'm going to export this as another file just in case something gets messed up with the old one just so I can go back. And before I update files in substance painter, I always make sure to save right before I do that. So I'm going to go ahead and save. And I've just realized that I haven't saved this at all, so let me go ahead and save this properly. And wait for it to save. So now that's saved, I can go ahead and go edit project configuration and select that new file. So the second one I saved out, and now it should update. So it's updated without issues for me, and that's because I haven't done any brush strokes on the mesh yet. Once you start adding brush strokes, stuff can start to get messed up. It won't always, but it sometimes will, that's why I would say, save before you do any changes to the mesh just in case something happens so you can go back without losing any work. So let's see what should I work on next? I think I'll set up the basic materials for the gloves. So let me see if the gloves have different materials applied to either side, as I can see here. So I'm going to have them in separate folders. And let me color code this. So let me just check which hand when you're naming stuff left and right, it can as you know, you can easily get confused between whether you named it based on which side you can see or which side it is for the character. I'm just going to go based on what I can see. So I'll do the right one first just because it seems a little bit more simple. So the first thing I'll do is I'll make a mask for the entire glove. And that will be the mask for the folder. Then within that folder, I will put a few folders for the different materials that make up the glove. So I'll have a main material for the main part of the glove. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any ID map for the individual parts of the glove. This can happen sometimes depending on how you model the object in Zbrush. You can go back and edit your high poly in order to have a polygroup for each of these parts, or you can just paint in those masks by hand. I'm probably going to have to paint them in, in this case. Or mask them out with UV islands as well. That might be possible here. So I'm going to add a material so I can see what I'm doing. And I'll add a black mask and I'll add a paint to that black mask and I can start painting out stuff by UV island probably. I'm doing the glove main material, so that's going to be all of this gray stuff. Let me check what material the thumb has. It looks to be just the regular gray. And not this darker material. So I'll go with that. And then, I mean, this can be tricky, and it might be that this is modeled slightly differently from the concept. So, you know, in that case, I'll just have to adjust. But it looks like it's actually the same. So it's just this section that is the darker material. So that was easy enough to mask out. What I will do is I unmask these fingertips. This might be easier to do in two D view. And I'm not going to take this all the way to the edge because I'm going to manually erase out the very edges of these squares. It looks like I was selecting all the way through here, so that's a little bit annoying. But I'll just use the two D Vu to finish up these masks. And. It looks like some of these are getting selected the way I want. You can see that some of the faces that I'm not selecting are getting selected. And I think this is because it's working based of projection and not BUVs. And I think there is an option to change the behavior of this. Let me just find it very quickly. Okay. Maybe there isn't an option for specifically this tool right now, but there is an option when you're working with other stuff. I'll show you that then. Oops. Okay. And last one right here. I think that's all of them now. I'll go around and paint around the edges a little bit. I want to leave some of the underlying material in here. Just so I don't have a gap between the different masks. So, you can't clearly see the gap between the different materials because that's not something I want. But I don't the only reason why, but I don't want this much of that margin. I'm using a mouse here, so it'll be a little bit janky, but I don't want to be flicking between my top screen and bottom screen while I'm making the recording. In substance painter, most of the time I'm using the mouse and it's only sometimes that I do something with a stylus. So I actually have gone ahead and switched my screen recording to my pen tablet display, just to make this a little bit easier for me to paint out. I'll be a little bit rough here and I'll be able to tweak this later once I'm actually doing a more final pass on these parts. This might be good enough for the final pass. I'm not sure right now. I'll I'll be able to tell once I have the final materials applied to this. Okay, that'll do for now. So back to the big screen. That's this material filled in. I'll just pick one of these fabrics very quickly. And normally I would have a lot more materials in here, you know, you build up a library, both from the different materials you make for your own projects, and then, you know, some you might find and download and use. I'm trying not to use a bunch of materials from, you know, my library of stuff just because it will be annoying if I just start dragging on, you know, finished materials to the model that none of you have access to. But in general, you should organize and keep useful materials from other projects you've done so you can use them in future. So I'll just use this artificial lever again. And then I'll swap it out later for something a little bit better. Now I'll do the secondary material of the glove. You can see that masking off materials by UV Island is a little bit rough sometimes just because it goes along the polygons. Sometimes you may want to paint around these a little bit more. Something that's also increasing the issue here is that there's a height map with a height value that's quite low down basically over here. So if I go to the height channel, I can change its position to be a little bit closer, and that alleviates this issue a bit. But I'll get into that more once I'm doing the actual texturing. Right now, I'm just setting up masks and blocking So adding a black mask and a paint and going to the polygon fill mode, and I can start selecting and painting. There we go. That was very quick. Now I can just add another paint layer on top of this so I can separately paint out these details. There we go. And I'll finish this up with a brush. So with a dark value, I'll paint away around the edges of this. And I'll move it to my other monitor really quickly. Okay. I will do for now. I'll go ahead and just copy this layer and paste it into here. Wait, I need to copy layers and then I can paste layers. I can get rid of this pink one and I'll just change the color of this and color pick it from the concept. Now, this sleeve uses the same material as the bottom of the glove, so I'll just add that to the mask. Yeah. And then these are going to be their own thing, so I'll make a folder for them. I'll call it glove straps and I'll add a layer in there. And I think I can color select these. But it looks like it's color selecting this part as well, so I'll have to add a paint and unpaint that. So for these, I'll just give them a flat color. I think I'll spend a little bit less time finding the perfect material for all these or placeholder material for these and just start working a little bit more quickly through these and just assigning colors and masks and maybe a roughness value. So stuff that's not meant to be shiny doesn't end up too shiny. Now, this I'm going to have to put a little bit more work into painting on since there's no like topology for it that I can easily mask off. So that's something I'll do later. And this is all I'll do for these glove straps, and I will make a layer for these knuckle pads, though. So I'll add a black mask and a paint. And I'll just fill in the polygons very quickly. And I'll add a layer so I can see what I've selected. And I'll finish these masks off by painting them. So using the brush tool now, I'll paint around the edges of the shape that I can see. Make sure I have it set to the right color value. Now, if the edges of your brush are a little bit soft, that means you need to change the type of alpha you're using. And I think that's what I'll do. So this alpha has a hardness value, and I'm going to turn the hardness up to halfway or a little bit more just so it still has a little bit of softness around the edge, so I don't get very jagged alias edges. So something like this is a bit better, I think. And I may want to do this in the three D view because it will be easier to see what I'm painting on. Another thing you can do is turn on the wireframe. If you want to turn the wireframe on, just go to this little screen icon, and this is the display settings. And if you scroll down quite a bit, you will get to the mesh wireframe option, and you can turn on the wireframe and change its color too if you need that. So maybe that red was actually a pretty good color, and I can turn up the opacity a little bit. But in some case, it's better to leave the wire frame off because it can get in the way of seeing the exact edge of where you want to paint something is. So I'm going to leave it off, but that's where you can find that option. And I'm going to go around and paint in the edges of every knuckle. Again, sometimes you need to decide which view is best for painting stuff like this in. In this case, I felt like it was a three D view. In other cases, it's easier to paint something in two D. Now, now having that underlying rough material get in the way of some of this edge is making it harder to paint. Obviously, I need to clean up the mask a little bit of the underlying layer in this case. But I think that's something I'll do later when I'm working on the final textures, you know, more final parts of the texturing of the glove. For now, I'll just hide those two layers. So I can just see what the normal map is showing and none of the additional normal detail that I've added with those two base materials. Yeah. So I'm being a little bit rough here. This isn't going to be a perfect mask. But I want to get it to be close enough for now, so I don't have to do too much cleanup later. Make sure you rotate your camera around. Now I forgot to tell you the shortcut for that. It is a shift and right click to rotate your lights around, not the camera. I think I accidentally said camera then. It's also Alt drag to move your view around. Let me move my shortcut screen keys thing onto the screen for you guys. There we go. So you can't always rely on, you know, using the polygon fill tool because polygons, of course, have jagged edges, and sometimes you need to paint around those jagged edges to have a bit of a smoother mask. So you can use the polygon fill to get a rough mask that means you won't have to manually go with a paintbrush and paint in every single corner of an area you need to mask off. But you are still going to probably have to clean up edges with a paintbrush or the brush tool, I mean, not a paintbrush, but you'll have to go in and clean up the edges. I'm getting a little bit lazy here and rushing just because I want to get these blocking chapters done. So I can move on to showing you guys how to refine stuff a little bit more. If you've gotten the gist of what I'm doing here, you can feel free to skip ahead after I've done the blocking. I will probably take, you know, maybe another hour or so for me to finish this up. I'm just going to paint around this whole shape. And I'll invert my color to do a little bit of cleanup. Okay. That'll be enough for this part. So I'll give this. What color do these have? Okay, so the knuckle actually has a different color in the concept to the rest of the knuckle pads. I will have to do something about that. I'll just give these a gray value. And then for the actual knuckle pad, let's see. I'll add a second layer in here and name it middle knuckle. And I'll give it its own mask. And I'll add a paint. And you can also go to mask view when you're doing your masks. So in this little drop down, there is a mask option, but sometimes you can't really see what's going on. So it's better to just add a material and give it a bright color so you can see what you're masking. Actually, what I want here is a white mask instead. And then I'm going to use the paint to paint out all of the areas I don't want. So it's just these knuckles. And the reason why I want a white mask is because I already have the knuckles masked out in this layer that's above this folder. So I already have the knuckles masked out. I just want to mask off these remaining knuckles, and I can do that very easily with black with a white mask, and then just, you know, going over with black where all of the knuckles are. So I think that's the glove done. I'll just drag the gold material onto here. Like so. So what's next? I guess I can do these ropes now. So I'll make a layer for the ropes. Oh, there's another glove I need to do, so maybe I'll do that. I'll give the gloves both the same color because they're kind of similar. Okay? So let's see what's going on with the other glove. There's a nice little extra drawing specifically for this glove. Very similar to the other one. It's just pink and black. So I will add another folder here and I'll just name this pink. And I'll call this one glove main. And I'll put the pink one above it just because this material is kind of on top of the of one, so I can make the mask for the bottom material extend out a little bit more than the top one. But now that I'm looking at it, the way this has been modeled is slightly different to the concept. So I'm going to have to figure something out here. And, you know, I'll keep the pink, and let's see. Which areas can I make pink here? So I could make the entire top half pink, but I don't think that'll look great. I think I'll just make this area pink and the rest of the hand blank. Yeah, that's probably what I'm going to have to do. So let's see if I can color select any of these parts. Looks like I can't the entire glove is one object, so I'll delete the color select. And I'll just mask off by UV Island. Hopefully, I gave these parts different UVs. Looks like I did, so that's good. Then I also select this and let's see the inner part gets selected down here as well. For the pink one, I will also add a black mask and add a paint and just polygon select this region and I need to add a layer in here and make it pink. It's nice to have el shaded concept art like this because you can usually color pick straight from the concept. You will need to adjust things sometimes, but, you know, in general, it's a little bit easier than having a fully shaded concept or like a kit path concept. Now, I'm trying to speed this block in process up a little bit, so I won't be masking out these labels right now. I'll do that later when I'm doing the actual, you know, pass on the texturing. So I'll add a folder for the ropes. The leg ropes, that is. And I'll add a color selection. Hopefully, nothing is sharing that color. I don't think it is. And now, if I look at my two D view, let me add, let's see, this carbon fiber texture maybe will work well for a rope, at least for now. And if I look at the concept or the two dv rather, let me see where these ropes are in the two DVe. I really hope they have UVs. I think this is them. Yeah. Let me make this bright red or something. Okay, that makes it a little bit easier to see. So I have them all facing the same direction. Looks like I accidentally selected this in the color selection as well. So let me add a paint to this mask and paint this out in black. And I'll up the scale of this mask. So what I want to do is make sure that it's following the direction of the actual ropes. And with this material, I can't really tell, so I'm going to select another material. This plastic cabling one again. So you can see this is facing the opposite direction or perpendicular. So I'll just set the rotation to 90 degrees. And this looks a little bit better. Now, usually, ropes or, you know, paaord twists over on itself. It's braided in a sort of like a helix pattern. This material isn't like that, of course. So, you know, I'll have to make a rope material a little bit later. Maybe if you set it to a 45 degree angle, it will look the part, though. Yeah. So that's one thing you can do for ropes and Picord like this, set it to a 45 degree angle. Now, it doesn't line up on the back side. To get it to line up on the back side, you need to specifically make the texture tile that way. It's something I've done before. I actually have a video on these ropes on the Fast Track tutorials channel. There's a video where I go into how to make tiling ropes that go around this sort of skull. So check out the Fast Track tutorial channel. There I go in, I think I talk a little bit about a tiling rope texture that I have and how to get it to tile. In this case, it's not really something I need because I can't see the backside of these ropes. So this is basically fine. I'll change the colors on this for now. Just something gray. And then I will go in and probably swap this material out for something a little bit better, but this is a great placeholder, and, you know, that's, you know, how you can sort of make ropes look a little bit better than just having the texture run straight along them. This makes it look like it's actually in a helix pattern like Pachord would be. So that'll do for now. Next up, I'll do the neck piece. So I'll just call this neck and mask it off. Or, in this case, I'm not going to use a color selection. I'll just use a polygon fill. And I'll So the neck piece is similarly dark material to the pouches and the black parts of the glove. Now, I probably want all of these parts to share the same material, but I still want a separate folder for the neck. So, you know, putting this part and these parts of the gloves and the pouches into one folder may seem tempting, but I would say keep them in separate folders because you are going to want to do fine tuning for each one of these parts separately, and that's probably easier if they're in separate folders. What you can do is just once you've got the main sort of base material for this kind of fabric worked out, you can just make a smart material out of it, and then just copy that across into all of different folders, and then in each one of those folders, you can adjust accordingly to that specific part. I think that's a better idea than lumping all of these different parts into one folder. But as I say that, who knows? Maybe later on, I'll decide differently, and I'll decide that maybe I do want to put them in one folder, and then I'll just change my folder structure to accommodate that. So it doesn't matter. So let's see. I'll just apply what I think is the same material that I applied to the neckpiece. And let me I will include these ropes into the neck folder, except for maybe these end bits. I'll put these next to all of the other metal stuff. Okay. So now, I'll set up some subfolders. So let me check what the hood looks like. So it's all the same material here, and the cape is also the same material. So that's great. That makes my glob a little bit easier. But sometimes when you have a lot of the same material, you also want to bring in some more variations. So it can also make things tricky. Let me up the scale on this and darken the color down to this dark gray. And I will add let's see. I'll just mask this by polygons again, I think. Oh, you need to make sure that you add an actual mask and don't just try painting into the layer folder, right? And usually I add a paint. You can just directly paint into the mask, but I find it's better to add a paint later. Because sometimes when you paint directly into the mask, I think it can be a little bit trickier to work with anchor points and stuff like that, and a little bit trickier to copy over as well. Not 100% sure, maybe that behavior has been updated, but it's better to just add a paint layer instead of painting directly into the mask. It also results in less confusion because sometimes you might have stuff painted directly into the mask and then stuff painted into here, and, you know, you won't know what's what. Better to just always paint into the paint layers, I find. So all of this will be that material. And then I'll set up a separate little material for these bits of rope. Mm. There we go. And I'll just assign a flat darkish gray color to this. I won't bother finding a nice material for it. And I'll turn down the roughness. Now, this front mesh kind of thing, I'll try and add an Alpha texture to this. So I'll add a black mask and a paint, and I'll mask it out. And let's see if there's any sort of mesh texture in here that I can use. Um, I think there is a smart material that does it. You know, stretch Sci fi. Now, I'm using a smart material in this case. Like I said at the start, it's up to you whether you want to use smart materials for this or just regular ones. The reason why I didn't use smart materials for most of this and just drag in a few of these regular materials in or just set up the colors is, you know, smart materials have a bunch of layers in them, and I'm probably not going to use most of these. So I don't I don't need these extra dust layers right now. I just kind of want the hexagon pattern, and that's all. So yeah, I'll get rid of this fabric pattern as well. And I guess I can get rid of this as well. So for this layer, I will set the opacity to zero. And then on this one, I'll add an opacity channel, and it'll be set to one, and I'll up the scale to something like heat maybe. Okay, so if you are adjusting the UV tiling and is doing nothing, that means that what's tiling is, you know, none of these things are tiling, right? This is just a base color, so you can tile that as much as you want. It's just a flat color. I won't change anything. Same for the rest of these value. What's tiling here is the actual mask. So if I go into the mask channel, and you can see there's this little fill, and this is the hexagon mask. So this is what is defining these hexagons. So now if I up the tiling on this to let's say 200, now the tiling is coming across. Now, I don't want this spas to be purely a 01 value. Maybe I'll make it halfway opaque. Oops, that was the emissive channel. I don't really need emissive on this. Uh, okay, I'll do something like this. Obviously, this is very much a placeholder. I'll need to find a better mesh material. And I'll put the roughness down on this as well, and that'll be fine for now. So I think I'm going to speed through the rest of these materials with less commentary now just because I think you get the idea of what I'm doing now, and there's not too much more interesting stuff going on here. So I'll just get to work on that. And that's going to be all for this chapter. Thanks to watching as always. 71. 03 Blocking Out Part3: Hello, and welcome to Chapter three of texturing. So I'm just going to carry on the block in for the accessories in this chapter. It's taking quite a while to do these, and that's just because there's so many small little different parts in this texture set, and all those little parts have different materials applied to them, so it takes a while to mask all of them out. The other parts should take a lot less time. So I'm working on this little drawstring buckle thing on the back of the hood here. I'll have a gold material on most of this. Oops. Another thing you can do now is instance materials. So I'll be able to instance a lot of these across each other. I'll use the two D view to finish this part. So I'll select a few polygons, just so I can find it in the two D view, wherever it is. Right here. And, something like that. I have to find the end now. Wherever that is. Right here. This is why it's good to group things together when you do your UVs, because if this end part was wherever, it would take me a little bit longer to find it. So I think I'll do the sort of gold stuff folder now. And I'll put all of the little gold things in one folder. I could try using a color selection for this, but I think I'll go with just a paint instead. I'll start selecting these. So let me add a gold material to this folder. And let's see what else is made of gold. I can't quite see what's going on here, but I'll just guess, and some of the stuff is always going to be up for you to temper when you're working from a concept. It's very rare for a concept to detail every single little thing you need to do. So I'm missing one of these parts, so I'll have to go in, and I guess it's good because I won't need to have a bunch of duplicates in the way. That can cause issues in substance painter as well, so Yeah, it looks like I still have a few vertex normal issues to resolve. Hopefully, it'll be fairly easy and quick. I will get around to that once I export this out and take a look at it in substance painter. So it looks like these parts aren't gold. I think that's going to be all for this. Let me check what color the earrings are. Of course, they're gold. And the head band is some sort of elastic material. So maybe I can do the head band now. And I'll just pick the color from there, and I'll turn down the gloss or the roughness and black mask, and paint, and just pick this whole thing. Okay, what's next? Let me do this little thing. Some of this stuff maybe I should group together. So maybe I'll add a big folder for loose hanging or, let's see. Never mind. I can group stuff up more later. So one for the end of the strap and another one for the main part. And I'll put this in the main part, and I'll color pick for color and turn down the roughness. Do the same for the bottom part. And I'll set up the masks now. There I go. Now, this color is actually a little bit brighter. So, that's that strap done. Um can do these parts as well now. I'll just co pick them. Let me just check the mask on this very quickly. Okay, so it's selected this whole neckpiece by accident. So instead of doing a color selection, I will do a paint because sometimes the values between colors when you have a lot of different parts, this is especially an issue with an object like this has tons and tons of different parts. You will start to have color values that are too close to each other and then those things, the color ID map will start to select across those things depending on your tolerance value as well. So I'll clean up this area now, and I'll call it pads. And I'll add a black mask with a paint, and I'll just select all of these. Then I'll add a layer to this And it looks like I accidentally selected that belt that I didn't want to. Okay. Now I can start to split this up into a few more layers. So top. Bad. Not layers, folders, I meant. Bottom pad and bottom pad under. I'll put this under that just so it makes sense. I'll put the top pad at the top there I go. Now I can put this la into this folder and start to mask it off. So I'll add a just the same black mask with a paint. And this is just black, so I'll just select the black color. Just add a black mask and I paint to the black mask for the bottom pad and select it, and I'll add a layer in here. And this one is actually gold, so I'll give it the gold material. Later on, I will be able to consolidate some of these materials and instance them, like I said before. There we go. And underneath the bottom pads there's some sort of grayish material. Then go, there's the pads worked out. What's next? These belts up here, I guess. So shoulder belts. So I'll just pick their color, and I'll add a layer in here to make sure that I picked the right color. There we go. Now, it's also picked this. I think I want to keep this separate, so I'll also add a paint to correct for that. Like so. And this part will have its own material to it, but it's something I'll break up a little bit later when I get into texturing more. So I'll just give all of the belts their own separate value. So I'll move on to these back clips here. These aren't gold, so I'll have to make a new material for that. I'll also include this strap into this material as well. Just because I'm running out of folders. There's no maximum limit of folders, but you don't want too many because then it'll be hard to find things. So I'll include all of these parts into shoulder strap thing, I guess. Now, if you notice that your substance painter whole file and everything is getting a little bit slow, what you can do is head down to Textas settings and lower the resolution. And this will just lower the display resolution, and the actual resolution will still remain, just as high. So I'm going to add these parts to that mask to that folder, as well, and this part as well. I'll leave this key ring and spit of rope to some other material. Not sure yet. And I'll have to add a sub folder in here, two of them. And one of them will be plastic. So for that, I'll just set this fill to this gray color, and the other one will be metals. And I'll just drag on this aluminum into this folder and add that mask. And I need to add a mask for this part as well. Let me go. Okay, so that's getting there. Just a few more things to go. Let's see. I guess I can do this now. Do M So time for this shoulder pouch. And I'll have a few folders in here as well. I'll do the gold one first. That one will be easy. And I'll do this in the two D view. I think it'll be easier that way. So not the whole object, maybe by UV Island. That seems to be working. Now let me take a look. Lids also included. This little strap will probably have a different color just to make it pop more nicely. There we go. That's the gold part done. Now I can do the main part. I'll put the main part underneath the gold part. Put a fill there in there, make it easy to see, and start painting it in. So that should do. I'll just rename this to straps. And I'll have a few more layers in here, a few more folders in. I'll have this kind of black that'll pop really nicely off of the gold. And I'll make it more rough. I'll use the brush to paint around a bit. Let me go. Add another folder in there. This would be the loose strap that hangs down there. And I'll just give this medium gray value just so I can tell that it has its own folder. And let's see, I'll add a folder for the metal parts. Definitely something going on with the vertex normals again. I'll have to check maybe I exported the wrong mesh because it definitely looked fine in Mab tool bag before. So this will probably be something easy to resolve. Maybe I just messed something up. There are also smoothness settings in Blender itself that may be changed when I detached parts. There's an auto smooth setting that needs to either be checked on or off. So I will definitely take a look at that a little bit later. For now, I just want to get this part done. So I'll just drag that aluminum material in here. Then we go. And now it's just this part. So I'll add a fill in here and I'll start painting. Now, let me just check the UVs for this part. Okay. So this will be easier to mask off with UVs. I'm going to have two folders within the arm strap folder. Like this. So I'll put this in the outer folder. And I'll add a paint layer in here, a mask paint. And for this, I'll just have the outer parts. Selected. So let's see what's going on here. Yeah, I think this is good for the inner I just need to add a layer in here and it's a dark color, give it a pretty black value and turn up the roughness a bit. Okay. This doesn't seem to be applying, so I'm just going to check the mask channel and see what's going on here. Okay, so it looks like this is the wrong way round. So I think I actually let's see. This inner part is separate somewhere. And I just need to find where it is. There it is. Okay, so that's done. So that's all of the shoulder pouch stuff done. Now, let's see what's left. I think it is just the boots, so great. Let's see what the boots look like. Okay, so lots of gold, lots of different stuff in general. So I'll add a mask to mask out all of the boots. Not with color selection, just with a paint. Hopefully, that's masked out correctly. Now I'll do the same for this. And I'll just do it by UV Island. And I'll put a layer in here and just make it a dark fabric. There we go. Turn the roughness down. That looks like it's masked off. Not everything I need. I think this is everything now. So I can add the next folder. This is gonna be the rubber. So I'll make it a little lighter. And I'll keep it shining, just so it. I can tell that I've applied it. Okay, that's that. Now, I'll do the buckles. And actually, now that I think about it, maybe I want the buckles to be with all of the rest of the buckles. So where did I leave those metal parts, right? So I'll just paint these into the. Okay. And, um So back to the boots, I'll add a folder for the whole front part of the boot. And I'll just color pick this and mask it off. So Oops. So what I'll do for this part is I'll set up the gradient map right away. Or actually I'll leave that for later because maybe some people will be skipping this part. So I'll do it later when I get around to doing all the proper texturing. So I'll just leave this this way and actually, I'll add one more folder. I'm going to include all of these little straps into that folder just altogether. And I'll paint in this bit down the middle as well. And I think I'll do that in the two D view where it'll be easier to see. H. Okay, there we go. So that's the block in for the accessories done. Now we'll move on to the other parts of the body to block in. The accessories take the longest just because there's so many little different parts in here. I think the cloth part is going to be a lot easier, and so will the mechanical arm. And for the face, there's really not too much blocking in I need to do there at all. So I think I'm going to end this chapter here because this seems like a nice opportunity to end it. I finished this part, so I'll finish this chapter too. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 72. 04 Body Material Block Out: Hello, and welcome to Chapter four of texturing. So in this chapter, I'm going to be doing the block in for the cloth. So let me isolate all of the cloth stuff and start blocking it in. This will be a lot quicker than the other than all of the accessories that I did before. So I'll add a pants folder. I'll add a vest folder, and a cape folder. And I'll start filling out the pants folder. Actually, I'll also add a loose cloth folder. There we go. Folders laid out. Now to fill in the pants folder. I'll add pants main and pants inset. So I'll add a mask that goes over all of the pants. For this, I'll be able to use color selections a little bit more easily because there's less colors in here, so less stuff will get, you know, pulled in by the tolerance value. So for pants main, let's see. Let's find a nice simple fabric. It doesn't seem to be a basic material for that, so maybe I'll find a simple smart material in here. So maybe this one. So I'll go in and clear out a lot of this stuff that I don't need. I'm just leaving this stuff. Let's see. I'll have this and I'll lower the intensity a little bit. And I will increase the tiling. Okay. And I'll change the color to I'll just color pick from this. They're convenient, very nice. Although, like I said, sometimes you have to change the colors around a bit because they won't always get it perfect. You know, in three D, some stuff looks a little bit different. Now, there seems to be a gradient of color that goes across this whole thing and a nice little pattern down here. That's something I will adjust later on when I'm, you know, finishing this stuff up. Now I'll add the zippers in one thing I could have done with these zippers is cut out the UVs for the zippers and included them in the UV island in the material set for the accessories. Now, what the advantage that gives me is I don't need a metalness map for all of the pants. So that's a whole texture channel that I can skip, and that's good for optimization. This is a personal project, so optimization isn't a huge deal. Everything's going to run just fine, even if I don't optimize it perfectly, but this may be something you want to do. I think it's going to make texturing a little bit easier for me if I include it together with the pants. So I'm not going to split it off into that other material. I've kept it all in one. But I am letting you know that there is that option. If you want to go for some more optimization when it comes to these materials and how they would work in a game engine, you can take this entire row of polygons that make up the zipper and split them off to a separate, you know, take this strip of polygons and put it in the material group with the rest of the accessories, and then you wouldn't need a metalness map for the rest of these parts because there's nothing metal else in this whole material set. But I haven't done that because it's going to be a little bit easier for me to texture. So now I'll add let's see. The inset part, yes. Okay, so I need to mask this off a little bit, as well. So I add a black mask and actually, I want a white mask because in this case, it's going to be easier for me to just paint away this area instead of paint up the entire model. You know, it's easier for me to paint this area in black and to paint the whole rest of the pants. So now I'll add a paint to this mask, and I'll start painting in black. And I think I can do this by UV Island. Yeah. So there I go. Now in the inset folder, I add black mask and paint it in white. Now I'll add a material. So what I'll do is I think I can copy this entire folder and paste it into the inset part. And get the base color, color picket from here. And the pattern. This will be fine. Okay, so what else is there on the pants? There's these pockets that are also a slightly different color. So I'll mask them out of the main pants material too. I don't think they have their own UV island. Let me just check. It looks like they do actually. So that's great. See how easy it makes it for me to select these things and mask them out. Oops. So I'll add a black mask, add a paint, and just click on those two, and I'll add a layer and I'll colour pick the color of this layer to here. There you go. Now let's check the three D view. Nice. All done. Now, I may want to come in and paint out some of these jagged corners from the polygons, but that's something I'll do later. So I'll add another folder for the little label. And this is kind of pink color. I think the label it hasn't been included in the mask by color selection. There I go. Now I can just add a mask of color selection here. Not here. I need to remove this mask from the material and actually put the mask in the folder. Of course, I will be using masks on materials, not just folders, but I'm setting up the folder structure now, not actually getting into the materials. Okay. Now I need to unmask this from the pants man. So I'll add a mask with color selection. And I'll pick this screen color in that way. It won't be included here. And this paint. Let's see. Let's take a look at the mask. This paint because it's not a fill of the entire thing, it's only painting in these specific plants. Later on, I may want to use these different modes like multiply or darken when it comes to my masks, but for now just normal is fine. I think that's everything for the pants. Now I'll move on to the vest. Let's see what kind of materials I have on the vest here. I have this thing, and there's two or three materials in here. So I'll just add three. The first one is stamin. Est red. And vest pena. I'll understand what it all means. Sometimes there's no good name for different parts. So let me do the vest main now. And let me do the main mask for the entire folder first. Now, the reason why I do a mask for the entire folder is just to make sure that I don't include a tiny piece of some other part in these folders as well as well. It makes things a little bit easier. That's one of the reasons. Anyway. So let me just add a layer in here just so I can see what's been selected. And let me unpaint the cape there. Okay. I'll move this into vest main for now, and let's see if there's a smart material that works nicely for the vest. So I'll just try this baseball cap to see if it's not too bad. It only has two layers to it. I'll delete this one. And I will pick a color that's slightly lighter like this one. So now I can unmask the areas that don't belong to this material. So let me check the ID map if it'll help, and it won't, actually, I think I did bake out two ID maps for these things, so let me see if the other one is better. Um, they seem to be the same, so not worth fiddling around with those. So I'll just start painting them skin or out. It depends on, you know, how you look at it. Let me make this a little bit smaller so it doesn't get in the way. And let's see. So selecting by UV island won't work. I'll just do it by polygon. And later on, I might want to refine the edges. You can see here that this is very angular and the actual object is much rounder. So later on I'll have to refine this. But for the placeholder, it'll be fine. So I'll do the red part of the best next. So I'll pick a red color just to make it easy to see what I am masking out and add a black mask and add a paint to the black mask and start selecting out the polygons that belong to this shape, whatever it is. This little Sci fi thing. There we go. Almost done. Now for the inner edges. This is a little bit off right here. But I'll leave it for now. Like I said, I'll refine all of this a little bit later. I just want to get this done for now. So I'll color pick the color. Maybe I'll pick this brighter one instead because that one's in shadow. Maybe I'll leave it like this for now. Maybe I'll saturate it a bit. That's probably too bright, but it'll work for now, let's see. This inner panel seems to be a different color, and it'll add a little bit of extra variations. So I will include. So let me color pick this color and select out this mask. Now we go. So that's the vest done now, I think. Nothing else to it. These two panels seem to be the same material. If I feel like I need more breakup, more different materials on this character, I will slightly change the material. But right now, I'm going to follow the concept. Of course, these are all placeholders. This material is quite ugly in the state that it is right now. I'll probably replaces the height map. I'll, you know, replace all of these things. But yeah, I'm just setting up these folders right now. So let me do the cape. I mean, I'm probably going to want to add a different material to these outer edges, maybe, or some stitching, but for now, there's nothing to it. Just a mask with color selection, and I'll throw in a layer and color pick it to that dark color, and it'll be fine for the cape. Set the roughness to be a bit lower. Not going to bother, you know, finding a placeholder material. And the last part is a loose cloth. So I'll add the main mask of the whole folder. Let me add a material in here so I can see what I'm selecting. And let's see if the color selection will work. I think it will. Now, right here, the color selection isn't really working. I can try though. You see, these are sort of where the inner part. I think probably what was used here was the bevel or, you know, one of the Z modeler tools. And what that does is it makes a bunch of poly groups in that area. So it's not great. I will just paint this out with a paint layer on top. Like so. Okay, so that's obviously not ideal. So I can't paint around here. I probably shouldn't have painted that stuff. Let me double check the other side, see what I did there. Yeah, that's probably bad. So I just want to paint these internal parts. And you can see that this is actually projecting from the three D view. So let's see. I think it's under the paint properties. If I scroll up, under the alignment, you can switch it from tangent wrap to UV, and now it will purely be projected based on the UVs, and I won't have the brush getting projected onto different parts of the body. So that's what I want to set it to. And that's where that option is. Remember, under alignment in the brush properties panel. Okay. So I think that's this cloth masked out. Now I need to mask out the different elements of it. So it seems like the whole thing is one material. So for now, I'll keep it that way, but I may decide to have a different material on these outer parts later on. So I'll just add a folder for this little tag. And I'll add a folder for all of the main stuff. For this one, I'll just copy the mask from here, so I'll add the color selection. I could copy this color selection, but it's just two option, two clicks to copy it to redo it. So I'm not going to copy paste that. I am going to copy paste this paint. So right click Copy effects. And then right click Paste effect. Now these masks should both be the same. And what I can go ahead and do is just paint out this little label. In this secondary paint layer. Where is that little label? Actually, hang on. In the color select mask going on. Oh, I painted in the label here. So if I just disable this or if I go into this paint layer and go to the mask you, I can just set this black and that doesn't really help me. I'll just do this. Kind of sloppy, but it's a blocking, right? So I'll put the tag above this, and I'll give it its own fill. And like everything else, it's a bright pink. I'm not sure why the color selector is so slow. I guess that's an Adobe thing. And I'll just color pick this. Later on, of course, I'll want to make sure that all of these pink colors match. I can do that now. Now it'll match, and I think that's all for the blocking for the body. So I guess I can do the skin now. So if I go to these two, and I'll hide the rest. Okay. With the skin, what you tend to do is you tend to separate stuff out. So the usual way to approach it is to do the base color and then the roughness and the other maps kind of separately. So the folders will be split up that way. I'll have a color folder, and then a roughness folder, and then maybe a thickness folder. But the main two maps you have are really color and roughness. So I'm going to apply my skin color, and I want the one that's the polypin data. And I'll put in a base layer below all of these. And of course, this is the shoulder, so I need to drag shoulder material in here. Then we go. So I'll leave the base color as is, have that material in here. And I don't want any other channels to be in this material, so I don't want any of these. I just want color in the color folder. And the arm probably won't need thickness, so I'll delete that folder. And in the roughness folder, for now, I'll just do that trick of having Oops. I don't want this here. I don't want it the way it was. There we go. So for roughness, what I'll do is I'll have a base level of roughness. So let me remove all the rest of these. I'm not sure what's happened to my cursor here. It's a little bit annoying. So base roughness tends to be a little bit higher, and then I like to work my way down. So maybe 2.5 for the or maybe something closer to three and three. I'll adjust all of this later. And then I'll add another fill layer. So this is roughness base. And I'll add roughness cavity. And I'll also only have a roughness channel visible here. And now I'll add a black mask and I'll add a fill to the black mask. And in this, I will put the where is it? The cavity map. Now, if I zoom in a bit here, and I go to the roughness channel, right now, it's not really doing much. And that's probably because I need to do a few adjustments to this. So I'll have this value put down to something lower, but it's inverted, so I need to, you know, I want the cavities to be rough and not everything else. So let me head on over to the fill layer. So under the mask, there is the fill, and I'll add an effect or a filter, add filter, and then just type invert, and I've inverted And I can put the base roughness down a little bit, and let's take a look at the roughness channel. Okay, something like this. Again, a placeholder, but, you know, that's the block in for you of the arm skin, and I'll do the same for the face. So I'll add two folders. Color. Roughness. Now, sometimes I don't even use folders for this, and I'll just have everything in one big stack because I tend to use less layers. If I have a very good starting point, I don't need to do that much adjustment to the face, but it depends. And I'll have a thickness for the face because for the face thickness is a little bit more important. So let me add color map. You can see that I don't have to mask everything, anything because, you know, there's nothing to mask here. It's just one material across the whole thing, and I won't have any other channels to go with the base color. Now for the roughness. I don't do subfolders here because there's nothing more complex going on here. I might need them later, but right now I don't And let me add that fill layer to the bottom, as well. Or I'll call it base, whatever. It doesn't really matter. And this is just so I have a value in every single channel. So let me turn off all the stuff I don't need here. And yeah, I'll keep it at 0.3. And I'll add a black mask and fill, and I'll find my cavity map. And fill it in there. And I think I don't know. Okay, so I'll add the filter. I thought for a moment that you could invert the mask right there, but I don't think you can. So yeah, I've inverted the cavity just like I did for the arm, and now for the roughness value, I'll set it to something lower. And there we go. That's the blocking done. I guess I can do the thickness as well. Now, One thing I have to do if I'm going to add thickness is, well, you'll see that there's no thickness channel or anything like that here. I could put it into the emissive or the opacity or something like that. I don't know. You can work around it that way, or you can do it properly and just add a channel. And under unsupported by shader, because this is the shader panel, and this is where you can select your shader. And, you know, of course, the shaders here are pretty simple because you're just working here to sort of do all of your textures, right? You're not rendering in substance painter. Usually, you're rendering in an external engine. So these are sort of just so you can preview what you're working on. I think there is a subsurface scattering shader in here. Let's see. I think they used to be, or maybe there's something you can download one, but it's not something I'm going to worry about here. So instead, I'll just use, you know, under this plus button, unsupported by Shader. So because they're not supported by the current Shader in the viewport, they won't actually show up or make any change, but they will be available to export. So that's the reason why I need to add this channel. And scattering or yeah. You can select scattering or translucency. Because they're not supported by the shader, it basically doesn't matter. So I'll just select scattering for subsurface scattering, and I'll disable all of the other ones. And the only real way you're going to see what this texture map is is if you go down to this drop down and you select it here. So you can see the arm doesn't have a scattering value, and that's why I put in that base layer to fill in all of the values of the different channels, but I don't need that there or actually, it probably will. Depends. I think a flat value for the shoulder will work for the scattering. For the face, it's a little bit more important because you want a little bit more subsurface scattering around the nose and the eyes and the ears, stuff like that. So this is a scattering channel. It won't have any visual impact on the viewport. I just need it so I can plug textures into here. So I'll just for now just drag the thickness map right in there. So here it is. And I'll just drop that in there. Okay. Honestly, most of the time, the thickness map isn't very useful and you have to paint it out yourself, I find, because if I take a look at you know, the entire chin is considered not thick here, when in reality, you have a lot of bone there. So there's no reason why you would have more subsurface scattering around the chin around the eyes here and the nose and the ears, that's definitely correct, but this chin isn't, so it's going to be something I have to paint out. And honestly, just painting around the tip of the nose and the eyes and ears is easy enough in itself. So a lot of the time I will end up having to just paint my own scattering map instead of mess around with all that stuff. Okay, so here's all of the blockings I have so far. Character is actually starting to look kind of cool. I'm wondering if I have enough time for this chapter to do the hard surface stuff, and actually, I think I do. So I'll go ahead and do that. Or on second thought, there's actually quite a lot of stuff in here, so maybe I'll leave that for one more chapter. So yeah, that'll be all for this one. Thanks for watching, and I'll finish up the blocking in the next chapter. 73. 05 Finishing Block Out: Hi. In this chapter, I'll be doing the last of the block in work, finishing up the mechanical arm block in. So time to get to work. First, I'll do a folder for all of the arm parts on this side of the body. So I just need two folders in here, one for the upper and one for the lower arm. And I'll start putting in the masks. And I'll put in some textures. So I'll just put in some flat colors for the materials here. This looks like some sort of mesh material or, you know, something with a little bit more texture. At least that's what's drawn in the concept. And this part seems to have the same material as the rest of the glove. And I'll set the roughness to something a little bit more fabric like on both of those. Okay. So that's that done. Now I can move on to this arm. So I think I'll split this up by surface material and not by part. So I'll do a gold folder. And I'll add that gold material in there. And I'll start masking it off. So let's see if color selection can help me. I think it can. So I'll color select this close up of the body. Now, this part looks cold down here, but I may want to change things because I feel like maybe that wouldn't look so cool, but maybe it'll look fine. Not sure. We'll see. And this part as well. And this part. Okay, so the color mask isn't going to help me there. So I'll add a paint in as well and just paint by mesh. Or actually there's a close up of the arm here. So later on, I may want to have some sort of duller material in here or something like that. You know, a lot of this is up to my interpretation as well. And even these two drawings are slightly different to each other. I like it when the inner part is darker. Actually, I kind of like this one, as opposed to what's going on over here. So let me see if these are all the gold parts. I know there's another gold part up here on the shoulder. So let's see if there's anything maybe that. The color pick isn't going to work there, so I'll also just paint this in. Um, where is it? Over here? Like soil. I'll do this panel as well. Just going by the concept and then once it's done, I'll see if maybe I want to change it. Right now I'm just doing very rough masks. This doesn't look great, but it's covered up, so it'll be fine. Next, I'll do a black layer or a black folder. This is most of the stuff that I see, not really. So I'll put in a nice dark color here. The color picker, I didn't used to be so slow in older versions. I'm not sure what's going on there. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I have some funny drivers or other issues going on here, but this is definitely weird. I'm going to go through and select some of these other parts. Let's see, under here as well. And over here, it's a different color, so I'll leave that. Um I'll leave this as it is for now and then I'll, as I fill in more of these colors, I will add to it if I need to. So I'll do the pink materials. And I'll color select some of these parts. Although it looks like I'm going to have to paint most of it, so I'll add a paint layer and start painting this probably going to be easiest to do this in the Tu Di view. So just selecting and masking off everything and being careful around the edges. Like this. And later on, I may need to clean this up. Like I've said before, just these polygon fills, you know, they end up kind of jagged because polygons are jagged. So sometimes you need to go in with a brush and clean them up. It really depends on the location, how visible it is, and, you know, how much priority you want to give that area. Of course, you know, if you had an infinite amount of time, you could go in and make everything perfect. And, you know, hand paint every single pixel. But none of us have that much time. So sometimes I will leave masks just like this if it's a very unimportant area and something that's not visible at all. So in this case, if I take a look at it, most of this is in that little crack. So, you know, you can't really see an issue until you get down to here, which this area I will have to paint out the rest. They'll probably be fine, but I'll probably go through and adjust everything that I feel is out of place. So now I'll do the white parts. So I'll just pick a bright white. And maybe I'll turn up the roughness of it as well, turn it down, so it's even shinier. And I'll start adding in the masks, so I'll add a black mask. Well first, I'll do the color selections. In this case, well, it's only this part that I can select. Maybe this back piece as well. But I don't want the front piece. I like this drawing. I feel like this adds some nice breakup, as opposed to this drawing where they're both the same color. So I'm going to go with this. I feel like this is a little bit cooler. So I'll add a paint and start painting the stuff up. I'll just select this whole thing. Put a white value here and then paint out the parts that don't belong. Like that. His p probably gonna take a while just because there's a lot of stuff I need to mask in en mask. But I'm just gonna stick to polygon fills for now. Hang on. Can I select these? Yeah, I can. Okay. Um, actually, what I'll do is instead of just painting everything out, Let's see. I'll pick this and I'll pick that and then I'll add another color selection. I'm going to also add another layer at the bottom here as the base layer, and I'll set this to something bright that will stand out so that I can easily see what I have masked and what I don't this white colour doesn't stand out very much from this gray stuff. So I'll just put a bright blue as the base color, and then I'll easily be able to see what's selected and what isn't. So it's just these parts, right? Okay, so now I'll add the paint layer and unpaint this and then manually go in and unpaint this. Okay. This is a bit smarter than what I was doing before. I'll just go through and do the same thing I did for the pink layer just in reverse. Instead of painting a white value, I'm painting in a black one to mask these areas out. A little bit tedious, but it is the fastest way to get it done when you don't have an ID map you can quickly select. I'll also mask this out. So this is I've turned down the resolution here just to make the whole file run faster. That's why this part looks a little bit jagged, but this is quite a small part as well. So once zoomed out, you can't really even tell that this is loraz. So that's fine. Okay. That's this part masked out. And then these little bolts in here as well should probably get masked out. I'll probably have to do a little bit of painting there later down the line. Okay. Let me see what else is there. I think that's everything for this white section. So for these bolts, I think I'll have a separate material. And it'll be something like some sort of steel color. So maybe this one will do fine. And I'll go ahead and mask it. Some of the bolts kind of look like they might be gold in the concept. But I don't think so. No, they're all metal colored, not gold, so I think I'll just make all of the bolts the same color. That will make logical sense. Now, what's this panel around the back colored? Like, it's also gold. So I can go ahead and add that to the gold. I don't think it has its own UV island. So I'll just have to paint it out in the two D view. So right here, going to the lack box to mask it out. And you see some of these corners aren't quite lining up to the polygons, so those I will have to paint out properly at a later date. Once I get around to finishing these parts up, doing them properly. Almost done. And there we go. I'm back to the three D view. Actually I can squash this down because I definitely don't need all of those materials visible. Okay. So there's some kind of other color of metal underneath these gold parts. So I'm going to add another folder for those. And also, I didn't apply the white material to that front part, so I'll paint that in now. Maybe I'll write under metal. I think that'll help me remember what this is meant to be a little bit better. For this, I'll pick some more dull metal color, maybe this one. Maybe I'll lighten the color up and make it a bit yellowish like the concept. This is just a placeholder, so that'll be fine. Now, masking this off will be a little bit tricky. I could just select the entire, you know, underlying part under here like that. The problem with this is I don't want these masks to be stacking up on top of each other. So what I don't want to have is, you know, this gold material stacking on top of this other material. While it's fine when I don't have any height maps in these areas, if I start adding more height variation to one of these lower layers, and then that'll show up in the upper layer, which is definitely something I don't want. So, you know, instead of just masking off this whole area and having the gold layer be above I'm actually going to have to go in and mask everything out properly. So it's not masking off this whole UV island, but masking around all of the different parts here. And let me just check where this metal part ends because I quite like how it's metal up here and then down here it's back to that black material. So I need to decide where it's going to end. So maybe here would be a good point to end it or maybe up here. That way, I'll start by doing this area. And this one. And this area as well looks pretty cool. Okay, bit rough around there with how stuff is masked off, but that'll be fine. Now, for this area, let's see. Around the back, what do I want around the back? I think I'll have this be that metal just so it sort of, you know, pops from this other black area. I think that would make sense. And then this part can be that black material, maybe. We'll see. I can always change these things later. Yeah, I think that's how I'll do it. Although I'm not sure. I'll just mask it off now, and then when I'm actually texturing, I can think about it a little bit more. It depends on what looks better and what kind of makes more sense, because I kind of want to think about, you know, if I make this metal, that means it's, like, a hard object but can't deform the less metallic black stuff, you can sort of imply that it's some kind of rubbery material or something like that. Of course, in games, you always have metals that you know, deform on Sci Fi characters and stuff. That's pretty common, like, you know, all the Ironman suits and stuff now, some kind of nano suit or whatever. So it's metallic, but it also deforms like it was just a regular suit. You can find all sorts of excuses for, you know, Sci fi materials not behaving like you would expect them to. So it's not hugely important, but I kind of like to think about those things and, you know, try and make stuff make sense, if I can. Yeah, definitely going to require a lot of cleanup around here later on. But like I said, these are all placeholders and block ins. So I'll leave the lower section in black, I guess. We'll see what I feel like once I get around to texturing that part. Right now, I feel like this is a good idea. I'm just going to mask all of this in. And because it's kind of a seam there, I'll do the rest with the paint brush. I'm using a mouse here, so it's not ideal. But I can get it pretty close. Now, I'll mask out the top part of this forearm, both sides, actually. But I'll leave that panel with a different material. And I'll see how this works. If I decide that it doesn't look nice, then, you know, maybe I'll not have this blank material because sometimes you need to adjust the concept to get it to work in three D, especially where I've gone from, you know, a slightly more stylized concept to a more realistic model. I think I could have just masked that entire island off. Now, this wheel in here is also black, but maybe I'll want to have two different materials for each part because stacking up a bunch of the same material kind of doesn't look that cool. And so what I'll do is I'll paint this front part in black. And then I'll have some different stuff for the wheel in this part's gold. So I'll paint this in gold. There we go. Nice little gold accent there. That looks pretty good. So these indents, I guess I could have the same color as this metal. I think so. And if I decide that I want something else, then I'll do that later. But right now, I'll just set them to be this metal color. And yeah, I'm getting a bit lazy with these masks. But, you know, I just want to rush through this blocking and get it done. So I think the last thing left are these parts of the wheel. So here they're black. I would at least want to have a different material on the inside and outside just because I think it'll look a little bit more cool. Yeah, there's not too much detail in there. So I'll put a darker material around the inside. Wheel. And let's see. Select the whole wheel and musk in white. Oops. There we go. And I'll put two subfolders in here. Wheel inside, and wheel outside. And I'll mask these accordingly. So let me find where this thing is on the UV sheet right here. Not a bit map, a black mask and a paint. So the outside is this middle section. I believe. This newest update has made the color picker so slow. I really hope it's fixed by the time you do this tutorial because, you know, it's unbearably slow. It's a bit ridiculous. But yeah, hopefully it will be fixed by the time you're doing this tutorial. You know, it seems like a pretty significant bug to fix. If every time you try and use the color picker, it almost freezes the whole program. So I really hope that's fixed very soon. It's very frustrating. And now for the wheel inside, I'll have some sort of metallic things. So I'll add a black mask and a paint and select these outside parts And just carefully mask this off. Again, I don't want to stack up these masks, so I'm trying to be precise with what I'm masking. I think I might be masking too much here. I'm not sure. Oh, well, I'll adjust this. Yeah, that is too much. I need to expand the mask of the outer wheel a little bit instead. So that's what I'm doing. So you need to pay attention to stuff like this and make sure you don't mask too much or too little. Now for this inner material, I'll just, you know, yeah, that'll do. And then later on, I'll pick something better that actually matches a bit more. So it looks like there's a polygon I miss there, so let me go ahead and find it. There we go. I'll add some of these parts to the bolts. These bits, I think they can stay in the bolts material. Of course, later on, I will paint them in individually, so they won't just share a material with the bolts. I'll paint them up, so they fit into this surrounding part and all of that goodness. What's this panel underneath meant to be? It's cold. Great. I'll go and add it to the gold material. There we go. Very quick. Just drag selecting for now, that'll be the blockout done for this part almost, I think, unless there's any other part that I've missed. So let's zoom out and take a look at what's missing. And yeah, I think that's pretty much everything. So this is blocked in, and that does it for all of the blocking. Stuff starting to come together. This is starting to look a bit like a character. And if I zoom out really far, you can almost pretend it's finished. So what I want to do now is export all of this and take a look at it in MamstTol and I'll set up all of the texture paths in Mama site tool bag so that I can just re export these at a click of a button and they'll show up in MaaseTolbag, and I'll be able to go back and forth between Substance Painter and Mamast very quickly. So I want to go over to Export Textures. This is where you're going to be exporting your textures, as the title says. So I don't need to export the eyes or the hair. Because I'm not working on these right now, and the hair is purely just, you know, just there so I can see where the hair is on this character. And the eyes these are placeholders. I want to finish up the skin a little bit before I start putting in the eyes because it's better to have finished skin when you're trying to really nail how the eyes look. So eight bit PNGs are what most game engines take. I think Moms at Tolbag can use 16 bits, but I'm not 100% sure. So if I go to my output templates, this is where you can make your custom templates and sort of preview what is getting exported. So the current output template is PVR metallic roughness. So if I select it here, you can see that every single texture is getting exported pretty much separately. So the metallic will be a separate texture, the roughness will be a separate texture, and the height, all of that stuff. Now, if I go over to Unreal Engine four, you can see that let me expand this a little bit. The ambient occlusion, the roughness and the metallic is all packed into one texture, and that's how most game engines do it. You will pack multiple black and white textures into one texture, and every single black and white texture will be in a different color of that RGB texture. So the roughness, in this case, goes in the green channel. The ambient occlusion goes in the red channel and the metallic goes in the blue channel. You have your opacity. I think this is opacity, and it's lumped in with the base color. It's in the Alpha channel. So when you're working with an actual game engine or working in production, you want to pack your textures together because that saves on file space and draw calls. Now, if you're working on a personal project, you can go this way, and that works fine for Mom sit Tool Bag. There is an option to select the different channels in Mom Zt Tolbak an image, from a texture that's been imported. But, you know, sometimes that can make it a little bit harder to work, I find So it's really up to you whether you want to pack your channels together or not. I'm pretty used to having my channels packed together. Now, while it is easier to sort of inspect channels individually when you have all of your channels split up, that also means at least three extra images in your texture folder and more stuff you're going to have to sort to. So I'll actually tend to pack occlusion roughness and metallic together most of the time. So what I think I'll do is I'm going to duplicate this preset, so the unreal engine four preset. And what I'll do is I'll edit it slightly. So I don't want the Alpha channel to be packed in with the color because I'm only going to have one object that will have an Alpha channel, so I may as well just have that as a separate texture. So let me just clear this channel, and there should be a way to convert this to just RGB. Or you can just add a new one. So I'll just copy the title of this one and paste it in here and delete that one, and then I'll find my base color and plug it in there. There you go. So when you're dragging stuff over, you'll want to select which channel goes into or RGB channels, in this case, because the base color is all of these different colors. Now, emissive. I may have some emissive parts. I'm not sure, but it's probably just going to be black and white emissive. So while I don't have because I don't have any emissives right now, I'll just get rid of this channel. And I'll track this one to the top just so it's back in the order it was in. So you want your base color occlusion roughness metallic, I pack these into one, just so I have less different texture files to deal with. And then normals are always RGB, and I'll add a gray texture, and in it, I will put the opacity. And I'll name this opacity. So I think if you copy this part, I'll copy it with the whole color space because maybe having a color space will be useful as well. The dollar signs, I'm guessing is just like in Excel, where you have a replaceable part of a name. So this is the important part that you'll want to change, and I'll put this as opacity. And I'll add another gray texture for the thickness or scattering. And I think that's all of the extra stuff I'm going to have. So I put, if you remember, I selected the scattering as an extra channel on my material when I was setting up the face material. So that's what I'm going to plug into here. Gray channel. And this will be my export template that I'll use. So I'll just rename this to character Export. And over here in the settings panel, you'll want to pick this new preset you made from the drop down menu. I like to export as PNGs when I'm working on my own stuff just so I can see the thumbnails. Usually, when you're actually working on a job, people prefer TGAs. Not 100% sure on the technical reason, but that's what people prefer. And for size, I'll just make it four k for everything. Of course, normally, you would have some textures be downscale, but in this case, I don't care. And I don't need to export the shaded parameters, so now I can just hit Export, make sure you have your output directory set to where you want it by default. It just puts it in some adobe folder. So yeah, I'll go ahead and Export. And this will take a while, so I will fast forward through this. So it's finished exporting now. So I'm going to head into Mama Zi Tol Bank and set up the textures. Actually, right before I set up the textures, this lighting is really horrible. So I'm going to fix it. First thing I'll do is I'll turn down the brightness of this HDRI. Now, this is a studio HDRI. I'll show you a website where you can find a bunch of good ones. So this is Poly haven, and it has a bunch of good HDRIs and textures, and a lot of them are free. So yeah, this is a great spot to find these. The studio ones are usually pretty good for rendering props and stuff, but the one I've picked seems to not look great. So make sure you pick something that looks nice. Also, Mom Zettle bag comes with a bunch as well, so you can just pick one of these. But usually a ig RI won't do all of the work for you. So I'm going to turn the brightness down a lot just so it does a little bit of fill light. So this is basically like the minimum brightness value on the model I'll have just so that, you know, even in a completely unlit area, there's still a little bit of light, so you can still see what's going on. And I'll add a few lights. I'll set up a very simple three point lighting setup. So I'll add one, and I'll just make it a spotlight. And with the move Gizmo, I will just move it off to the side a bit and then rotate it. E is for rotate in Mast tome, and just at a sort of 45 degree angle to the character. I'll set it up. And I want to have it a little bit higher sort of pointing downwards. I'll also set up another camera. So press a little camera button here. And then I mean camera one right now. So in this drop down menu, you can select which camera you're looking through. So the main camera is sort of just what you're going to use to look around the viewpoint. And then these other cameras sort of just like, you know, use them as predefined shots you can switch to just to see how your character looks. So I'll switch back to the main camera, and I'll press a little lock here next to this camera one just so I don't accidentally move. So this is going to be the brightest light, so I'm going to up the brightness of it a little bit. For your final render, you'll want to have a little bit of color here just to add a little bit of variation in life to the render. But when I'm just testing stuff, I don't want to add any color to the lights to throw off how I see my textures. So I'm going to up the brightness, not that much, just a little bit. So let's see how that looks. Yeah, something like this is fine, and there's a nice shadow there as well. Great. I'm just being very quick here as well. So lights get added from where you're looking from when you press the button. And there's also different types of lights. You can have spotlights or Omnilights which is like a point light in other software. In this case, spot lights are pretty good for what I want. So if I go back to my camera one, I want this to be sort of rim light. So I think this is actually working fairly well. I'll move it a little bit more. Let's see how this looks. Okay. And I'll put the brightness down a little bit. But it's sort of highlighting the edge of the character here. And now for a third light, this is going to be the fill light. So it's just to fill out the shadows so they're not completely dark. So I'll go back to that first camera, and I'll turn down the value a little bit because I still want shadows here. I just don't want them to be very dark. And this is an okay three point lighting setup. It's not great, but it'll do for now. Just for the purposes of actually being able to see my textures, it's better than what I had before, at least. So I'll go ahead and drag in all of the different materials from the folder that I exported too. So here's all my different textures. So here's the accessories one, and I'll just plug that into the albedo, and I'll plug the normals into the normal. And now I have occlusion roughness metallics, so I'll plug this into roughness, and it's occlusion roughness metallics. So metallic is in the blue channel. So in this little drop down, I'll just select blue, and I'll drag it into the metalness as well and into the occlusion. So occlusion is in the red channel, and metalness is in the blue channel. Roughness is in the green channel is what I meant to say. And now for the cloth. So I'll plug the normals in and the base color and the roughness and the metalness and the occlusion, and then I'll set up the channel, so green, blue, red, and the hard surface parts. So normal map, Albedo, Roughness, metalness, and I mean occlusion. There we go. I'll set up the channels. Like that, and the hair I'm not going to touch and the skin, I didn't do too much to the skin, but I'll drag these in anyway, just so that now every time I reexport they will be automatically updated. Now, there's no metalness here, so I can just skip dragging anything into the metalness channel there. But there is an occlusion. Occlusion is in the red channel and roughness is in the green channel. The same goes for the face. Now we go. So there's all of my textures setup. Of course, this is a very rough block in. Now, something that I did notice before while I was texturing was that some of these normals didn't look right, and I'm guessing it was an export setting or something I did wrong in Blender and looking at it here in Mama set Tool Bag, definitely looks bad, right? Definitely not what I want. So I'm going to go ahead into Blender and see if I can fix this. Hopefully, it's something very simple. Okay. I don't actually need to head into Blender just yet. One thing I remembered is the Unreal Engine for XbotPset in substance Painter. Unreal Engine four uses direct X format normals, and MamzTolbag uses OpenGL format normals. So what I need to do here is just flip the Y channel for all of the normal maps. So just go through all your materials and take the flip Y button. And you can see these are looking much better. In fact, I think everything looks fine now. Not sure what's going on here. Let me check substance painter. Looks like someone accidentally selected some of the wrong stuff with the masking tool, but I'll fix that in the next episode, I guess. I will say that my lighting definitely isn't great right now. So let me up the brightness of stuff a little bit because I can really not see what's going on here too. Lighting is something that you definitely need to work on and spend a bit of time on to make sure that your models look as good as possible. But yeah, the block in is complete, and that's where I'm going to end this chapter. So thanks for watching. And in the next one, I'll start refining stuff. 74. 06 Body Material Creation Part01: Hello, and welcome to Chapter six of texturing. So in this chapter, I'm going to start refining the cloth part of the body. The way I like to usually work is to work from the largest parts and then do the smaller parts later because if you more or less finish the largest parts of your model first, it gives you a better impression of the entire model, how it's going to look if it's finished, and that will better let you tweak the smaller objects to that largest mass. So I would suggest working on the objects with the largest surface area, the ones that make up the most of the body first, try and finish those up a little bit and then work on the smaller stuff. Because if I just went ahead and finished these accessories by themselves, let me isolate them very quickly. So if I just look at these accessories by themselves, I can't really get a good impression of how they look or how they would look in some of everything, because it's a lot of small objects and they're kind of separate from each other. So I think it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to finish these smaller parts first. I think it's best to start with the big stuff that has the most visual impact. Once you get that roughly in place, then you can start tweaking the smaller things. Now, another thing you should do before you really start texturing is gather a little bit of reference. Now, this definitely isn't all of the reference that I'm going to need. I'm going to be gathering more as I go along. But what I've done here is I've gone through all of the sort of different materials that I see on the character here. So, for example, these gold fabric parts. I've gone and found some gold fabric just so I kind of know what that looks like. Gone ahead and found some metal buckles and some of these ammo pouches, seeing what kind of materials they use usually and kind of how that hard plastic looks. For the mechanical arm, I've gone ahead and found, you know, all of these robots and body armor and stuff like that. Now, some of the mechanical arm has sort of gold plating, so I think that's a fairly good fit, and I might use stuff like that or this for that. And strangely enough, older cameras look really sci fi, and that's a good source of reference for this kind of stuff as well. Now for the actual cloth, you want to kind of find some good pictures of the actual weaves, the actual textures of the cloth, just so you know what you're doing when it's time to figure out the material for that. Now, I haven't gone ahead and found everything I need here. This is really rough, and, you know, I don't have great reference here yet. It's something I'll work on more as I go along, you know, If a question ever comes up while I'm texturing, I'll stop. I'll go to Google search and find some images of fabric that I need. Now, what I'm thinking about here is there is sort of dot pattern that starts up towards the bottom of these pants, and I'm thinking it might be cool to try something like this rubber or silicon printed on fabric for that. That might be a cool way to do it. Another thing is this sort of looks fairly streetwear inspired. So I'm going to go ahead and collect some more images of streetwear and see what kind of fabrics they use and how I can sort of match that as much as I can. So another thing I did was go through the substance three D assets and brows through those and see what kind of stuff I can use from there. Now, I'm just going to give some suggestions on what kind of materials you should use from services like this and which ones to kind of avoid. So I've picked up stuff like this, so this might be good for the sort of mesh part up here, but at the same time, I may want to just make this myself. I'm not 100% settled on this kind of stuff. One thing I will say is that you can basically ignore the color channel when it comes to this because I don't need, this camo pattern on mine, and that's easy to replace. So really, you don't have to consider the actual color of these materials at all. Because you can easily replace that. And you don't really want to be using the same exact color as the stuff you just downloaded because, you know, you want to put work into everything you're making here. So stuff I would suggest using is just very simple fabric weaves, and you're just going to be using the normal map or the height map or the ambient occlusion, not the colors, not the patterns. Don't pick anything with, like, a pattern on it, I would suggest. You want to make patterns yourself. So, you know, there's a lot of fabrics. We have all sorts of different patterns on here and srites and stuff. I would suggest don't use those because firstly, it's fairly obvious to someone if you did just get that pattern from a website. And secondly, you know, you want to show that you do know how to make these patterns to anyone that's looking at your portfolio, you know, if you're looking for employment, um, sometimes you're going to have a pattern that comes up that doesn't exist already on substance three D or some other place where you can download it. So you want to show that you know how to make your own patterns. So I would suggest not just using patterned fabric from this and just use the fabric materials from here purely for the actual, you know, the normal map, the actual way the fabric is woven together, because that part is, you know, it takes a little bit of time to do, and it's not hugely significant. It's like a really tiny amount of a tiny part of the whole material you're going to build up. So, stuff like this is kind of what I have shortlisted. Again, here, this is multiclod. I can easily replace this or change it. I'm not going to, like, use this green and gray color, of course. I'm just looking at the actual sort of texture of the stuff and not considering the other things. So I have stuff like this short listed, but I'm not going to go ahead and download it just yet. I want to go through and see what I can figure out without these with what I have in substance painter already. So that's what I'm going to go ahead and do now. So I would say, before you start, gather some reference of what the fabrics you actually want look like and try to figure out what you can do in substance painter before you go ahead and download a bunch of stuff you might not use. So I'm going to start with the largest part on here, which is the whole pants. I'm going to turn my resolution up here just so I can you know, fabric weaves are very small and detailed, so I kind of need the full resolution to be able to see what I'm doing here. And I'm going to go over to my actual folder that I have for the leg fabric, so where is that? Here we go. And I'm going to look through the materials that come pre packaged with substance painter one more time, just to see if there's anything I like. So I did a bit more browsing and research, and I found that maybe this style of fabric is kind of what I want to go for. So it looks kind of shiny and it kind of folds in this big way. And it'll probably work quite well with the silicone printed onto it this pattern. So if I look closely, this is some kind of polyester or polyester blend. So that's kind of what I want to go for something that looks like this close up. Now, of course, when you're making game assets, you kind of have to exaggerate things to get them to show up from the view or from any reasonable distance. If you just make things actually to scale, sometimes it just won't show up. Firstly, because it gets mi mapped and compressed away to the point where the pattern completely disappears, and also because you're not always close up to something. And real time rendering isn't perfect. So sometimes you need to exaggerate stuff to get it to come across properly. So I'm just going to hide the temporary material I stuck on here. And one candidate that I found that my work, in this case, is this fabric UCP. If I go ahead and get rid of the folds layer for now, and I enter the actual material, And I turn off the custom color. And if I look up close, this is somewhat reminiscent of what's going on here. But I don't think it's quite working. This sort of normal map isn't of the highest quality. So I'm going to go ahead and try try and find something better on substance three D assets. But if you want to go with something free or you don't want to download anything, you can probably get this to work quite well. So I'm going to try this material. All you have to do is if you have a subscription, of course, is just hit this download button and find your downloaded file, then head into Substance Painter. Just drag it into the viewport and you'll have this window, and you can either, you know, you can decide where you want to import the resources to. So current session, we'll only have it appear while you have substance painter open right now. If you close it and open it again, it won't show up anymore. If you import it to the project, it will always be here in the shelf whenever you open this project. And if you import it to your library, it will always be here regardless of what project you have opened or anything like that. So I'm going to import this one to library, since it's sort of stock default material, it's not very project specific, so I might use this in another project. So I'm just going to put it in the library. And here it is. It's a base material. Sometimes other materials will import as smart materials, but this one is a base material. So I'm just going to delete this fabric UCP, and I'll delete these synthetic spots as well, and I'll just drag this into the folder. And now I need to scale it correctly and rotate it in the correct direction. Most of the time, fabric follows the direction of the legs. So I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees. And tie it maybe eight times. And it seems to be working quite well. But obviously, it's the wrong color, and I think it's a little bit too shiny. So you can see that the actual detail of the texture weave isn't really being represented here. And that's something I can do in Mama toolbg actually with a micro tiling texture because it's unlikely that you're going to be able to pack enough resolution into a real time character just yet to where you can zoom in as much as you want and just have all of the actual weave detail be just straight in the texture. Most of the time, what we'll do now is have a micro tiling texture that tiles over and over again and sort of adds to the surface detail of the material. You have more control over textures like this in Unreal Engine, where you can build your own materials and shaders. In Mama Zi toolbag, you have a few options there as well. So I will be showing you how to set that up a little bit later. So now I need to see how this looks with a more pale color. So this light gray. I'm going to go ahead and pick this. And it still looks pretty good. And I kind of like the way the shininess is reading, but I'm going to tone it down quite a bit, m Here's the roughness value and I'm just going to turn this up a little bit to maybe something like 0.65. Now you'll notice that this material is called polyamide sm suit. I don't actually care what it's called or what it really is. I just care that it looks good on the character. You can see there is a gradient that goes from top to bottom here, and I want to work that in as well. Add another layer and I'll set this one to just color so if you alt, click on one of these, one of these material slot buttons, it will select only that one. So I'm going to alter, click on color, or you can go ahead and deselect or re select each one individually, but it's a little bit faster if you use a shortcut. So the gradient starts with this sort of darker color at the top. So I'm going to color pick that. And now I'll add a black mask, and I will add a generator. And this is I'm adding it to the mask. Make sure you're not adding it to the actual fill layer. You want to be adding these generators to the mask, and there should be a world space generator. So you can use this one or you can use the mask builder. So the mask builder, let me show you the mask builder, as well. One of these is a legacy. So this is the old mask builder, and this is a new one. They've kept the legacy version of mask builder in substance painter just so you can use the older materials still. But you probably want to use the new one because it has more features. So this will contain the same thing as the WorldSpace mask generator. Just the Worldspace mask generator is stripped down and it doesn't have all of these options. But the general mask generator still has the position gradient option. So it probably helps to turn on the mask view when you're applying this just so you can see what's going on. And I'm going to have to turn down things like curvature. By default, usually curvature is on, but I don't want curvature here. I want the worldspace normal, so I'm going to turn up the WorldSpace normal. Or not words normal. What I actually want is position gradient. So I'm going to turn up the position gradient. You can see now it's masking top to bottom, and it's kind of what I want, but I want it to be the other way around. So there is an invert button right here. Now you can see it's masking bottom to top. So if I take a look at my texture, Actually, I'm not sure if I want it to mask in this direction. Oh, well, it doesn't matter. So you can affect the balance to sort of shift the center of the position gradient, and you can also use these sliders for every single direction, so you can mask right to left and then combine them to get an angle as well. I want top to bottom the most. And I want to lower the balance a bit and increase the contrast, just so I'm masking from the top of the pants. And I don't want to invert this, actually. I, you know, I want the sort of darker gray material to be applied to the top, and then I want it to get lighter towards the bottom. So let's take a look at how this looks. It's not very intense yet. So if I up the contrast a bit or take a look at the mask, another thing I can do is make this color a little bit darker, so maybe I'll pick this color instead. That's making it show up a little bit more. But again, I want to increase the intensity of this. So I'm going to edit the mask a little bit more. And if all of this is too confusing to deal with, because there's way more options than just the position gradient in here. Like I said, instead of using that one, you can just use you can just use a different generator. So just the world space, not the world space, the position generator. So this one will have all of the extra options stripped out, and it will just be all of the position options. So it'll be a little bit more simple to work with this one instead of having to scroll through all of the other options. So you can see right now the mask is very subtle. I want to up this. I'm going to go into the mask so I can see exactly what my mask is doing. So I want the whitest value to be at the top here. So I can change this using the global balance slider to sort of shift things up and down. Or I think you can use the top to bottom. So by default, the global balance is at 0.5. The top to bottom is not really helping in this case, so just going to shift the balance downwards a little bit. I need to play with all of these different values to get the type of masking that you want. So right now, the effect is still a little bit too subtle for my liking. I want it to be completely black at around this area because I don't want this gray to be added anymore, so I'm going to up the contrast a bit. The other thing you can do is if these two slides aren't giving you enough control by themselves, so I'll turn them down now, and I'll lower the contrast. Is instead of just using these two sliders, you can add a filter and use a or rather not a filter, but instead, you want to add levels. And this will give you, I think, a little bit more control and just a better idea of what's going on. So this is black value. This is the white value, and this is where they are, you know, the mid value. So I think that's probably the best way to handle position instead of just using the brightness and contrast sliders that are in here. Probably better to just leave these as they are and add a levels. So levels is if you right click and you can just add levels, and that'll give you this little graph you can play with. I think that's a little bit more effective than these sliders. So I'm just going to go ahead and dial this into where I want it. And this is looking a lot more like what I have in mind. So there's kind of a harsh line there, so I kind of want to blend that out. Let me see that most of the transition is in the scarf area. Now, you don't have to follow the concept that closely, really, but I kind of like the way it's set up here, so I'm following along with that. I think this looks pretty good. So I'm kind of happy with this colour transition, but I'm seeing that these colors are a lot more warm than what I'm looking at on the concept. So I'm wondering if that's just, you know, just because the background is different here and it's making everything look different. But I think it's actually more to do with Mm. I guess I didn't have that color picked correctly. So I'm just going to repick from here. Or maybe one of these darker shades. I see this is kind of bluish, but maybe also kind of pinkish. So I'm just going to use this color slider to sort of work it in the direction that I want. So I think I want a more blue value than pink, and I'll up the saturation a little bit because that always looks more colorful things a little bit more nice than just gray. There's already plenty of gray on here. So I'm going to be pushing the sort of saturation of the colors a tiny bit just so there's more color variation across the character, and I'll push the value down. So it can help to use these sliders instead of just blindly picking spots on the color selector. Okay. Let's see what I had before. Maybe something like this. I think the color is a little bit too warm on the bottom here, and I think that's just down to the actual material. It's adding a little bit more warm color. So if I take a look at this, see what the chromo slider does? I think that's just the color variation, and then the luma is the brightness. Then there's a color variation hue slider, so maybe this one will be useful. But it doesn't seem to be doing all that much. Now, one thing you can see is there is a little bit of color variation added by the material here, and that fades out as I go over it with a different color. So the way you can sort of bring some of this color variation back, is firstly, the blending modes. So you can try different blending mode. I would just say, go through them and see what each one of them does. And that's the best way to figure out what each thing means. A lot of the time you'll use multiply, so multiply multiplies to different color values. When I just say it multiplies different color values to each other, that doesn't mean much. You know, at least when I was learning, that didn't really say anything to me about what that actually does to the colors. So that's why I say it's probably just best to test all of these and see what they do. Um, dark only darkens the colors, and then lighten only lightens the colors. So these are all very useful things. And then things like linear dodge and all these. I use these less often, but they still come in handy sometimes. So sometimes you just want to scroll through all of the different blending modes and see one that actually works and helps. So yeah, just experiment with these. I don't think there's any guide or way to describe what they do that will actually be, you know, more effective than just trying all of them yourself. So going to see how multiply looks, and I think multiply looks pretty good on this. I'm going to go with multiply for now. One thing I've seen here is the fabric texture sort of going diagonally across this part. And that's because it is diagonal in the UV sheet. So what I think I'll do is I'll cut this out and I'll apply the material over again at a different angle there. But I'll do that once I sort out the rest of the shading on this material. So what I'm going to be doing here is getting this to 70% finished level or a 75, and then I'll be able to do another pass later on once all of the different material sets are worked up to this level. And then I'll be able to do a final pass once everything's done, and I can tweak very subtle things. But right now I'm trying to get this pretty much mostly done, like all of the different details I want to be here. I want this lettering to be there. I want these patterns. I want all of that kind of stuff to be there. It just might need some more adjustment and some more tweaking, maybe a little bit more wear and tear or stuff like that. But what I'm going to be doing in this pass is basically getting this to be 75% done. So let's see what's next? These little dots. This might just be a little bit of an artistic flair in the drawing. You know, sometimes you put in a little bit of dot shading, you know, maybe that's the artist's style and stuff like that. So I'm not sure what the intent is with these dots, if that's an actual pattern or they just decided to use that kind of a cool way to shape things. To me, it looks like an intentional pattern, and I'm going to try and represent this in the material as well. I think it'll look pretty cool that way. So let me just name these layers properly. So I'm just going to go ahead and find some sort of dot texture in here. So tiling stuff like this is usually going to be in the textures panel. There used to be a separate grunges and procedural folder, but I guess they've been lumped into one right now. So that's a little bit annoying. I liked it the way it was in the older versions, but, you know, what can you do? You can probably set up more folders, I'm not sure. So look through these and try to find something similar to the result you want. And, you know, if you can't find that, then you'll probably have to either go into substance designer and figure out a way to make this procedurally, or you can just skip that and make it in Photoshop, not procedurally. Both options are fine, and, you know, I think it's great when you have procedural materials from substance designer, but sometimes it just takes way longer to do that, like ten times longer than just making a pattern in Photoshop, which you know you're just going to use once. So, you know, you don't have to learn substance designer. It's a useful tool to know. It's a useful skill. But most of the time, I don't use it in my projects just because it takes longer, and if I sort of know what I want, then I don't need that much procedural control. Now, luckily, there is a gradient dot pattern right here that comes from a substance painter. So I'm going to add a black mask and add a fill, and then just drag this into the fill. And over here, just to make this a little bit more distinctive, I will add the height. And I'll make the base color a little bit of a brighter white. And the roughness is probably good at this value. So this is kind of what I'm going for. Now, it's kind of passing the height details from the previous layer through. So this is something that can be really frustrating to beginners if they don't want this. And the way to fix that is you need to switch the layers this drop down menu to height, and then you can change the blending mode of the height. So when it's in base color, you're only changing the blending mode of the base color, and then for each one of these, you can adjust all of their blending modes individually. So I'm going to go to height, and I'm going to set the height blending mode to normal. And unfortunately, that hasn't worked. And that is because all of this detail here isn't actually put into the height channel. It's being put into the normals channel. So it actually doesn't matter what I set this height channel to because the height channel isn't what is adding this sort of detail. So if I go over to the base layer, and take a look. You can see that it doesn't even have the height channel applied to it by default. This might be because it's an old material, and it's, you know, before they switched over to sort of using the height channel as something that can be used to make normals. Because usually when you're working in substance painter, you don't want to be putting stuff into the normal channel. It's much easier to put stuff into the height channel, and then substance painter will automatically convert that into a normal map. Unfortunately, this material doesn't have that option, so, you know, that's a bit annoying. But there is a way around this. Because you can do the same thing that I was trying to do for the height channel to the normal channel. So if I set the layers down to the normal channel here, right now, it's set to normal detail. So that's a way to combine normal maps to add detail on top of the normal map. Instead of normal detail, I just want to set this to normal, and now it's just replacing this flat normal color over any normal map that might be underneath it. So that's what you want to do. Now onto the actual pattern that's going on here. So first things first, I need to tile this a lot more. So maybe five tiles will be enough. Maybe not. Maybe eight. So this is starting to get close to big enough. And right now it's tiling across the whole leg, so that's a little bit annoying, but I'll fix that later. I'm just going to move this down a bit so this lines up with the bottom of the leg. You can do that with these offset sliders. So this one is the vertical offset, and I just want to offset this so it's at the bottom of the leg. It can be hard to do with just a slider. So I'm going to do this with the type in value. Okay, that's close enough for me to sort of get what's going on here. Now, let's see. There's a few different sliders here. I haven't used this sort of mask yet, so I don't know what these do exactly. Let's just play around them. So this is just the scale. So I could have used this instead of the tiling, which maybe I'll do. May as well. Actually, this seems more convenient than increasing the tiling because it's just increasing the number of dots. So yeah, this is the way to go, I guess. And you can change the scale of each individual dot as well. But one thing I don't like is that all of these are in a square pattern, and stuff always looks better, I feel when, you know, things aren't in a square pattern, but in a diagonal pattern. So I don't think I want to use this gradient dot. I'll try and find something else that works a little bit better for what I want. So let's see. What about this? So this is called metal grate round, but obviously I'm not working on a metal grate, but maybe this will work. So first things first I'll up the tiling value. And you can see that these are diagonally tiled. So that's a little bit better. I'm going to up this to 32. Okay. And now you can see that they're all the same size, so that's not what I want. Now, if I lower the contrast and take a look at the mask, you can see that they're kind of blurred out. So they're all the same scale here, and that's obviously not what's going on here. They're kind of just fading out, but I feel like it will look better if they also get smaller as they fade out. So that's what I want to do. Because the idea I have is, you know, silicone printed on fabric like this, right? And this can't really fade out because it doesn't blend with the fabric. So instead of fading it out, I'm more interested in just making the dots gradually smaller. I think that will work a little bit better, and it'll be a little bit more interesting. I'm not sure. It might look just really garish and too much, and I might just have to scrap that idea and maybe just make it into colored dots. I don't know, but I'll see. So this metallic grate pattern is, you know, I like it. It's working quite well. I like that it's diagonal. I might increase the scale of these a little bit, and I've set the contrast to be quite low. Let's take a look at how the material looks right now. Okay, kind of cool. I don't know. Let me go back to the mask view. There are shortcuts for those, I think, but I don't know them, so sorry. I'm going to add a generator on top now, and it's going to be the same position generator from before. And I'm going to set this to, let's see, multiply kind of does the opposite of what I wanted to do. Overlay doesn't do anything. What I want is not darken. It's one of these, and it is let's see. I think it's subtract. That seems to be doing it. Now I'm going to up the balance, so the pattern fades out along where I want it. So it's somewhere around here. You can see because I blurred these. So you can see they're kind of blurry around the edgeless as it's subtracting, it's making the circle smaller instead of just making them fade away at the same size that they are. So just setting this to the lowest contrast value worked for me. But if that's not enough for you, what you can do is just add a filter and add a blur filter on top, and that'll sort of let you adjust how the subtractor is working by moving that intensity around. So you can see that there's actually quite a lot you can do to vary up and adjust these timing textures. It's not just something you slap on and use a mask for your material. There's a lot of stuff you can do with this stuff. So I'm going to continue upping the position. So somewhere around here is where I want it to end, but you can see these are fading out now. So what I'm going to do is at levels. And I will use these sliders to sort of bring these dots back to where they were. So now every single dot is a hard light, a white value instead of being, you know, just faded out. These ones to the top are sort of, you know, because they're the fringe values, they kind of not very consistent. So, that's not great, but I can just erase those if I want to or, you know, clean them up by hand. Doesn't really matter. Another thing I can do is maybe play with this position slider a little bit to see if I can get them to behave better. But So I think something like this will work, but now you can see they're kind of jagged around the edges. So on top of that, I will add another filter, and I'll add another blur. So you can see these now looking a lot nicer. So I'll lower the blur intensity a little bit. And you see the fading out again. So let me see how this looks as a material. So I think I need to lower the blur value a little bit. You can see it's getting jagged now, so I'm going to up the blow value again. And I'll try a different filter on top of this. I'm going to go back into the mask of you. And let me see. I think I can sharpen these up with a histogram scan, maybe. Or I can just try using levels on it to sort of trim off the slightly more gray values. So let me take a look at the mask. So now this is sort of just blowing up the white areas. I want to sort of yeah, thin the boundary between the sort of gray value so that it's a little bit sharp around the edges. And I can sort of do this several times and then blur each one maybe. Although maybe I should just go back and do that. Right here. Or I'll try using a histogram scan. So let me add another filter, and use a histogram scan. And I can see what this looks like on the material. So let's take a look at the mask again. Um, you know, I'm not 100% sure this is doing the job. Maybe it is. I think this is doing pretty much the same thing that I could have done with the levels, though. So maybe I'll just do that instead. So sometimes you just need to stack up the same effect several times. That's another way of achieving things. So I'm just going to sharpen the edge of this up so that all of the dots are basically the same white value. But because I added a blur layer prior, it's going to be a slightly smoother result than before, right? This is super jagged, then I add that blur to sort of blur stuff out. Then I add another levels modifier. I'm going to sort of up the contrast again here, but it's going to be slightly less jagged than the last time because it was already blurred out. I can also bring the white value down here. So if I can pair these, definitely less jagged. And I'll add another blur. And I'll try and keep this one very small. I just want to smooth out the edge there. So maybe that's close to working. I think this looks pretty cool. Maybe they're a little bit too thick now. So I'll go and adjust the height channel and put it at maybe half its current value. That seems a little bit more reasonable, maybe a little bit more. And I think they're a little bit big, so I want to scale all of them down somewhat. But in general, I think this looks pretty cool right now. You see that they're adding a little bit of a highlight. Let's see. Maybe if I lower the roughness, a little bit more make them more shiny. Yeah, let me change the scale of them so slightly. Now, when you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, a small change like this can actually have a pretty big impact. So you can see a lot of the ones at the top just faded away because they were too small and they were just getting blurred away into oblivion, basically. But I can adjust the global balance slightly to bring them back. But I think I need to up the scale up as well. Let me tile this 48 times. Maybe not that many and increase the scale. I'll make it a little bit tighter and increase the scale again. I'll lower this position as well. And I want them maybe a little bit bigger or a little bit more dense. Let's try that 48. I think something like this scale is working for me, I just need to extend it outwards a little bit. I can do that by increasing the scale. I like that these are blowing together. But I have to decide if I'm okay with everything blowing together down here like that. I think that actually does look good. So maybe I do want to keep it this way. I just need to reduce this down a lot faster. So if I up this value, you know, maybe something like this works. And I think I can increase the, let's see. If I take a look at the mask and the levels here, if I adjust to this a little bit, maybe I can get these smaller circles to sort of move down a bit, but keep this here. So let's see if I can do that. I don't think that's quite working, so maybe if I lower the scale of Ds. And then with the levels modifier or the position gradient. Let me just tie all of those. Some of this I can just paint in manually if I want to. So let's see how this looks. Not as good as it was before, I think. It's going to undo. And yeah, I'm looking at the clock here, and it's about time to end this chapter. But hopefully that's sort of giving you a good idea of, you know, how I work with building materials like these. I'm going to carry on working on this in the next chapter. So that's all for this one. Thanks for watching. It. 75. 07 Body Material Creation Part02: Hello, and welcome to Chapter seven of texturing. So I'm going to carry on texturing the pants and all of the body materials in this chapter. I went ahead and sort of figured out what I want to do with the dots on the bottom of the legs here, just in between recordings, just so you know, you don't have to watch me waste time turn settings on and off again. I'm going to go with this. So I'm not going to have the pattern sort of invert to mostly the raised part and then, you know, holes in it. Instead, I'm just going to have it just get a little bit bigger as it goes upwards. And really all I did here was increase decrease the scale a bit and increase the spacing. And I think this is working quite well. It might bring the pattern upwards a little bit. Now, one thing I did realize while I was doing that as well is that I actually have this at the lower resolution, and that's why stuff looks a little bit jagged. So when you're trying to really figure out how the fabric texture looks, you may want to increase your resolution. You can see that increasing the resolution also extended the pattern upwards more. So these are things you have to look out for. While you can just switch the resolution back and forth. Some details just disappear. The texture changes a little bit. So I can use 2048 if I'm working and I want the viewpard to be a little bit faster, but I need to constantly be checking it at four K to see what's changing when I do that because you can see this change is quite significant. But that's enough of that. Another thing I'll say about this pattern is along this side, I will have to do some manual cleanup and just paint some of these dots out in the mask. But that's something I'll do later once I have all of the other stuff set up, I think. What I'm going to do right now, I think, is you see this looks quite flat, especially if I just show you the base color, it's pretty much completely flat, aside from the color variation that's just in there with the actual material. I always find it nice to add a little bit of a curvature map to everything. I'm going to go ahead and add a fill layer and name this curve. And I'll add a black mask to that fill layer, and I'll add a generator. And in this case, I might use the mask editor because I might want to blend a little bit of ambient occlusion into this or something like that. So what I'm doing with the curvature map is just adding some very subtle highlighting to sort of, you know, add just a little bit more variation and intensity to the whole material, just so it's not one flat color. So stuff like this, but I'm going to tone it down quite a lot. And also the blending mode I'm going to set is maybe something like overlay. So I'll set this to a bright color. So just a pure white, in this case, because all I'm trying to do is just push certain values up a little bit. I'm not trying to add color or anything like that, and also click and make this just the color channel. And I'll go ahead and adjust the mask generator now. So by default, it always just gives you a little bit of curvature. So I'll just work on adjusting this. So right now, it's asking off way too much. I don't want to lighten all of these flat areas. I really only want to be lightening these bumps and sort of details. So the way the curvature curvature settings in the muscular area to work is, you know, it's broken down by the frequency of the details. So huge will get rid of the hugest largest volumes and then big. So all of these, like, large, big, huge, you know, they're like the actual roundness of the entire limb and stuff like that. And then medium is sort of getting smaller. And then I also don't want this to be too sharp. So I'm going to turn down the sharp value as well and the fine. I think I might just leave it with soft. Let's see what happens if I turn it up. Something like this. And I think I'll leave it at that and then just maybe turn down the value quite a bit. Let's see. Over here. And now let me take a look at the material. I'll go to the base color channels. So little highlights like this is what I want. Now, I'm going to go through the different blending modes and see which one I want. So really, there's no huge difference between linear dodge and overlay in screen right now. I'm probably just going to go with that. You can see if I set it to overlay. Overlay does have a little bit of a difference, in fact, maybe overlay is the better option in this case. One thing I'm checking is when I zoom in is if this is preserving the actual color variation in the cloth because I don't want to be drawing over it with just different colors. Because if I turn it to normal, you can see it's just replacing the color and actually reducing the color variation, whereas overlay, preserving that. It's just pushing the lightest values. So I think I'll use this. But this is looking quite sharp around here, so I want to blur it as well. I don't want this to be too obvious. So with the blur, it's looking a little bit better. But I think I want to add a little bit more in, so maybe the first thing I'll try is just increasing the opacity, and I'll also add maybe some fine detail. So let's take a look at the material in general. So you see it's sort of adding a little bit of pop to everything. It's making everything just look I feel it adds a little bit of detail, and I quite like this. It's not 100% realistic, but I feel it does add just that little bit. And I usually add a little bit of curature and sometimes I also add a little bit of ambient occlusion. Now, another thing I want to add is a little bit more creasing to this cloth, because right now it's quite flat. Now, you could just do this in the sculpt and just, you know, work even more and drag a bunch of alphas or maybe some sort of tiling noise material in zebrush and just, you know, really put everything into the sculpt. But what I've found to be maybe a little bit more useful and give you a little bit more control is put all of these big folds into your sculpt, like has already been done. But then I'll put in a height map in substance painter when I'm working to add that final level of tertiary folds. So that's what I'm going to do now. And the only channel I want here is the height channel. So I'll add a black mask, and I'll add a fill. And in that fill, I'm going to go ahead and find the folds grunge. So I think there is a new one, right? So cloth folder. This comes with substance painter, I think, I'm pretty sure. So I'm going to drag that on here. Let's take a look at how it looks in the mask year. So this is way too big. I need to up the tiling quite a bit here. So maybe something like that. And let me up the height slider a little bit. Okay, so this isn't looking great. And I'll see if I can tweak this into something that's a little bit better looking. So right now, I've increased the height a little bit too much just to exaggerate the effects so I can see what's going on. And once I'm closer to what I want, I will dial it down a lot. So let's see how the balance value affects us. That's sort of clipping off all of the lower areas if I take a look at the mask view. That's definitely not the kind of effect I want. Maybe if I just increase this, that's slightly better, I think, but increasing it too far clips the upper value. So probably best to just leave this at 0.5. Contrast, also not very helpful. So I'll try increasing tiling a little bit more and rotating this. Sometimes just changing the angle of the actual material helps or the mask. You know, I just is more in line with the actual shape of fabric. But I think in this case, this isn't that usable in my case. I'll try a little bit more to get this to work, but I'm not really sure about this one, so I'll try this one as well. Okay. But I'm not liking these. They just don't really seem to work at all. And I'm not sure if I would use these in any sort of case. They're just too small or too big of a detail to really be useful. So I'm not going to use these. Now, I think a pretty popular trick used to be is to use the crystal procedural texture for folds and stuff because it can actually tend to work quite well. So if I up the tiling a bit and maybe rotate this to the side, I will make this triplanar. You can see right now there is a very severe seam around any UV seam because this is tiling in the two D view. What you can do instead is project it in a triplanar projection, and that will get rid of any seams you might have aside from here, I guess. But you can turn down the hardness to alleviate that. And what this basically does is it projects to attract the texture from every single different side, so you end up with less seams. But this doesn't work well for things like fabric patterns and stuff like that because it breaks those. So let me see how the material looks now. You can see this is kind of cloth like. So if I up the tiling a little bit more, and increase the disorder maybe and decrease it. Let's see what the different rotations do. I think this way worked quite well. Let me lower the height value now. Mm Yeah, this works better on some different objects. I don't think it's working very well in this case. What I like to use the most for this stuff is there's actually some really great height maps that are available on ArtStation, and I'm sure you can find them some other places as well. But I'll show you the ones I. So I have this one and this one, and I think they're fairly good. So what these are are just tiling textures of cloth wrinkles. So, you know, it's just something you can tile over your object at a very low opacity and just add a bit of secondary detail. It doesn't have to follow the actual forms of the cloth precisely because these are sort of memory folds and stuff like that. So it's really just to add a little bit more height variation and detail to your cloth, right? You can compare this left one to the right one. That's basically what I'm going for. So these two, I found to be fairly good. They're very cheap. Now, if you don't want to buy stuff, this one even has a free option, like a sample. Now, if you don't want to buy stuff, what you can do is either a simulate something like this out in Marvelous Designer and then bake it down to a flat plane and then make it tile using Photoshop or the Quicksil texturing tool has a very good function for making stuff tile. Substance designer also has a few tools to make stuff tile very easily. All of those options work. The one which requires the least experience is probably Photoshop, but I think that one requires a little bit extra work. So that's one option is just simulate this in Marvelous designer. Now, Marvelous designer won't give you these memory folds, so you'll probably have to go over it in Z brush a little. And add a little bit more detail to that. That would take a fairly long amount of time if you wanted to do it yourself, but it's doable, and I think it's a good exercise. The other thing you can do is actually go ahead and scan these yourself. So I think, scanning or photogametry has gotten pretty good these days, and you can even do this kind of stuff with your phone, especially if you have an iPhone that has the LiDAR sensor, you can probably get a pretty good result if you pull out a nice flat piece of fabric and sort of scrunch it around a bit or fold it up and then unfold. You could probably get some nice lectures out yourself, and that would be a really nice exercise and a fun way to do it, I think, and maybe you can even write that down in your post. And, you know, I think that kind of sort of hands on attitude. A lot of employers or people looking at your portfolio might enjoy that. But me, I'm not so hands on, so I just buy these, and I suggest, you know, if you don't want to deal with all that scanning or sculpting these out yourself, buying them is a perfectly valid solution. I'm just using the height map to build up my materials here. So yeah. If you're going to do that, then go ahead and buy one of these. I think either of these works perfectly well. I'm going to drag one of these onto my object. Some of these don't tiles so well, I found, not all of them will work. But I think this one is working quite well, and this is kind of similar to the effect I want to achieve. So just something very subtle like this, right? I don't really need anything more from this. This is kind of just what I'm going for, a little bit of secondary detail to make this look a little bit more cloth like. So right now I'm applying this horizontally, and I think I'm going to actually rotate this and maybe it looks a little bit better vertically. I'm actually not sure. If I take a look at the mask, this is what it looks like. I can also play around with the levels if I want to adjust it. Another thing I can do is add another fill layer and put another tiling texture on top of it. So maybe at a larger scale, or maybe I'll put the larger scale one underneath. Let's take a look at the material view. So I'll put the tiling on this one to three and see how that looks. Okay. I'm going to increase the intensity of the height. So something like that. And then on top of it. I'll add another fill, so this is a different texture. It's kind of not helpful that the names are so long that I can't tell what they are. I could have gone and renamed all the Vs if I wanted to, but it was a little bit lazy. So, this one's smaller, and I'm going to overlay it on top of the other one. So let me take a look at the mask of you and set it to multiply. No. I'll set it to overlay. Now, this detail is sort of stacking up on top of itself, and I'll have a higher frequency one breaking up the lower frequency one. So let's see how these layers look individually. I think that's working quite well, but I'll lower the intensity of the smaller one. Oops, a little bit. And don't push it any more than this, you just want this to be a very subtle breakup of the smoothness. You can see it's just adding a little bit of breakup to the highlights. I don't want this to be overpowering really. In fact, I will lower the intensity even more. I'm just lowering the opacity of the masks because I put in a black mask, it'll just put the mask closer to black. There's a few ways you can lower the intensity of the height effect. I can go in and lower the height slider. I can go in and lower the opacity of each of these fill layers, or I can lower the opacity of the entire mask or the opacity of the entire layer. Now, right now I'm in the base color mode, all I will lower is the opacity of the base color. If I want to lower the opacity of the height, I have to go into the height mode. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use these two fill layers to adjust my opacity because that'll give me a little bit of control over both the high frequency detail and the low frequency detail. I keep accidental hitting that little X, though, so that's not ideal. Sing something like this is starting to work quite well. You see, it's just adding a little bit of breakup to everything, and that's all I want. I don't want anything else. I can also try and mix a little bit of color into this. So let me take a look at the base color, and I'll lower the intensity a lot, and I'll set it to linear dodge or an overlay. And this is just to add a little bit of variation across the entire object. And this doesn't necessarily have to be white. Maybe I can use a gray here. Let me take a look at what the mask looks like. Okay. I don't really think that's doing too much, but I'll keep it just in case. A better use might be just adding to the roughness instead. So let's take a look at the roughness channel. And I'll lower the opacity of this a lot and I'll set it to overlay as well. Or actually, maybe I'll keep it at normal and I'll just keep the opacity very low because I want to darken and lighten things at the same time. Um Okay. So, this isn't doing too much, but hopefully it's adding just a tiny bit of variation across the shape. Although, you know, it's probably excessive. I didn't really need to go in and add the color or the roughness here. It's not doing too much. So the next thing I think I want to do is add stitching along all of these seams. Now, again, this is something you can model in Zbrush if you want to. But again, I find it better to do this in substance painter because you have a little bit more control. Another thing you can do with seams is use trim sheets for them, but I'm not going to be doing that because it's a bit of a different texturing work then, and I feel like it gives you less control over some other things. So substance painter has pretty good stitch brushes. You can also make your own. I'm going to be using this one. So you want to be using a paint layer for this. So instead of the fill layers that I've been using up until now, I'll use a paint layer. And this is obviously way too big. But if I scroll down something like this, it is probably close to the size I want. Now, don't go and put in, you know, big stitches that don't fit the type of fabric, right? So if I draw this in around the entire model, it'll look a little bit goofy because if I take a look at my references, looks like I didn't save my Pure Rf files, so I lost all of my references from last time. That's really annoying. Make sure you don't do that yourself because it sucks when that happens. I'm going to go ahead and find my references again online. Okay, so I've got a little reference again and see how small the stitching actually is, right? So you need to pay attention to these sorts of things. Now, sometimes the stitching will be too small for it to really show up on, you know, a real time character at a real time resolution. So in those cases, you may want to upscale the stitching a little bit, but the other thing you can do is just sort of simplify it and instead of having individual stitches with, you know, a color and a pattern to them, you may just want to have a sort of dotted line indicating the stitch or something like that instead. But you do need to pay attention. This is kind of a low resolution photo, but you can see how tiny the stitching is. Don't go in and put these big goofy stitches in because, you know, it'll just look wrong. So I'm going to scale this brush appropriately and then apply my stitching. So that's a little bit too small. I think something like this is an appropriate size. There are also a few options to play with in the options here. So you can change the color of the actual string or thread. I will darken mine down a little bit, just so it stands out, but I don't want to overdo it. I've scaled up my brush so I can see a little bit better what's going on here. So, let's see. I'll put the color to something like this. This is too dark, so yeah, something like the previous value. Something like this, I think will work. So you've got your color option, then you can select what kind of stitch you want. So there's a bunch of different kinds. I am just going to go with the first one running simple because that's what the reference is showing me. But there's a bunch of different more complex ones over here. And there's also a few different options for thread selection. I'm just going to go with thin. I quite like that one, and then you've got your puncture intensity and your seam intensity. So there is a little preview window right here that sort of shows you what it's going to look like. So that's a little bit more useful than just dragging strokes onto your model. Now, this isn't a procedural tool or the settings for it are procedural, but once it's applied, playing with the sliders won't change anything. So keep that in mind. You need to get it right basically the first time. Otherwise, you will have to redo it. Unfortunately, there's no real other way. I mean, you could build a fairly complex smart material to do this task, but this will do just as fine because the stitching is going to be very small here and not a hugely significant part of the actual texture or material of this model. So I want the puncture intensity to be pretty high, and I also want the seam intensity to be pretty high. I think these values can go higher than one if you type them in, as you can see. I'm not sure if that's actually changing anything on the model, But, maybe I'll set the seamen density to 1.5, something like that. So I'll set this to two maybe. And I'll have the roughness kind of low at 0.75, and then you can set the height range here as well. So if you set it to a very high value, one here, the height range between the different parts will be bigger. But you can't really see that too much here because this is very small and very low resolution. So I think I would like the density of the stitches to be a little bit closer to each other. So I'm going to lower the length and see, increase the width. I'm not sure if there's a way to change the difference between stitches. So sending it to double stitches will double the sort of density of stitches. Now I can up the length a little bit and lower the width. Let me check my concept again. I see that this is kind of what these look like, very small stitches, very dense together. I'm going to lower the width a little bit again. Now the actual stitch part looks really dark, maybe the intensity is a bit much. So I think I'll go with that and I'll see how it turns out. I'm going to undo all of these tests. So I just undid all of the tests I did, and I'm going to go through and draw these stitches along all of these seams. And I think I'll do one patch and then see how it looks. So yeah, getting to work on this. To me, this looks too dark, so I'll lighten it. The part that really looks too dark is the actual seam part. The other thing to note is that most of the time on modern clothes, you use the same thread color as the rest of the fabric. So that's probably something I should have done from the start. I'll just color pick from the surrounding fabric. Let's color pick something really bright. Okay, it looks like I'll have to dial this in by hand. Something like this is close to the actual fabric color. The width of these reds seems really too high. I'm going to lower the puncture and the seam intensity on small. I think something like this is a little bit better, a little bit more realistic and maybe I'll scale it down to something like 0.4. You have a little bit more control just typing in the numbers here instead of relying on the size shortcut. It takes a little bit of time to dial these things in, of course. But I think something like that is going to have to work. So instead of undoing this 20 times, the other thing you can do is just grab a big eraser and erase all of it because this is a paint layer. So back to my brush tool, and I'll try drawing these on again. Another thing you might want to do is use the two deve for drawing the stuff instead. If you're going to use the two deve, you want to make sure to set your alignment to UV instead of tangent wrap, that'll give you a better result. In some cases, the three DVe is better, though. Like, right here, I'm not sure and I feel like doing it in the three DV might be a little bit better. So as it gets brighter down here, the stitching really stands out more. This might be a desirable effect. It might not be I can always adjust this using a filter or just a layer on top of this to sort of adjust it slightly. Looks like I accidentally put a bruh stroke here, so let me erase it. Okay, so I'm not going to be putting seams along here because this is probably sewn up from the inside. So the seam would be internal and not visible. So I'm not going to put anything along this part. But these indents that I just brushed along right now. So stuff like this. You know, this has no clearly visible way where it could be stitched. So, you know, that means the stitching should run along it. Now, this might be glued or something like that, but I felt that adding this detail would be nice. So that's why I chose to sort of add some stitching here. So let me take a look at this result. I think this is working quite well. I'm pretty happy with the stitching. But in some areas, it gets a little bit too dark and in other areas, it's a little bit to mainly too dark down here. I'm not 100% sure if I want it to be this dark. I guess I'm undecided for now. I'll keep it and then I can always adjust to this later. This is what I mean by first pass or 70% done. So I'll leave stuff like this. And then, you know, when I do my second pass, that's when I'll decide whether I want to adjust this more or not or redo it. Right now, you know, I'm just going to get in all the layers and all the types of details I want, and then I'll do the final tweaking of the actual details later on. So I'm going to draw on these scenes for the other side now. Okay. So the last spot we've assumed will be around here. Usually around the I don't know what this flap is called on a pair of pants, but usually it's double stitched, I think. So maybe I'll try different type olive stitching option. And that's all there is to the stitching, I think. So one last detail that there is on these pants is this sort of lettering. So I'm going to try and add that in now. And there's a few ways you can go about it. So I'm going to add a fill layer and color pick color maybe darken it a little bit. And I'll just set it to color, and I'll add a black mask and a paint. And just let me get a very simple brush. I need to make the color a little bit darker. And let me erase all of this. So you can try just painting this by hand. Probably in the Tu Di view is best. So which panel would this be? This one, probably. But that would be really difficult, right? It's not easy to make this stuff look very consistent. Of course, you have all of the different options for the brush to help you with this, but it's not great. The other thing you could do is just export this out into Photoshop and draw out a mask there, just straight onto the UVs, or you can make a stencil and then stamp this on. What I think I'll do is I'll go ahead and make a stencil and I'll do that in Photoshop. But I'm seeing that this chapter is more or less coming towards the end. I'll do that in the next chapter, thanks for watching and I'll see you there. 76. 08 Body Material Creation Part03: What I'm going to do now is draw out this pattern in Photoshop. Now, I could just head straight into Photoshop and then maybe take a screenshot of this pattern. Copy it and paste it into Photoshop and then trace around it and use that as an alpha to paint out this sort of pattern or lettering or whatever this is. I can't really tell. I don't think this is letters, just some sort of graphic pattern. So I could just go ahead and do this, take a screenshot of the thing from the concept and chase around it. The issue with this is the proportions are slightly different between the concept and the three D model. And the other issue is that the UV space is slightly warped from the three D space. So all these things add up. And if I were to just trace this and paste this, it might not exactly look right. So I tried this earlier when I wasn't recording, and sort of it was hard to get the pattern to fit. So something you can do in those cases to make this a little bit easier is to just sketch out your pattern in the three D view and then take a screenshot of that and trace around that instead of just tracing around the concept. You know, straight. Just sketch it out and then trace around the sketch. Where did my two D view go? So I'm going to sketch out roughly where I want this pattern in the three D view. I'll change the layer color to something a little bit more bright so I can see what's going on. And I'll just go ahead and be very rough. The first thing I want to do is sort of draw out where this whole thing is going to be. So if I look at a concept, it's sort of like that, and it's in multiply mode, so that's why it's looking a bit strange. So maybe I want it to fit around here somewhere. It stops above the knee and it doesn't go that high up the thigh, so maybe something like this. Okay. Nice and we set it to the ID map. So to cycle through all of the different material maps, you hit B and then to cycle backwards to shift B and to see the main material, you just hit M. So those are the shortcuts for that. Now, we'll go ahead and start sketching in the pattern now that I have sort of area that it's going to take up, drawn out. And I don't need to be very precise here. This is just sort of a guide for me. So let me see how something like this is working. I think that'll do okay. So I'm gonna go ahead with this, and I'll just take a screenshot of the two DQ and paste this into Photoshop to make a nice and clean version of Okay. And I need to set my color mode to color. I'll change the background color to black because I'm making an Alpha, so the background is black and anything that I want to show up in the Alpha will be white. This texture is 2048 by 2048. Alphas, you always want to make them square, even if the detail or the actual shape of the alpha you want is rectangular because substance painter doesn't really support rectangular alphas. It always forces them into a square. That's a little bit annoying, but that's what it is. You always have to make your alphas into a square. And I'm just trying to make this take up the entire texture. So something like this will be okay. And I can lower the opacity a little bit and add another layer. And I'll just use the shape tools or the line tool to draw this out. So I'll be using white. Let's see. I think the width for lines is in the weight panel here and not here. It's been a while since I did this sort of stuff in Photoshop. So, I'm not the best with Photoshop. I'm sure if you've done a little bit of graphic design or used Adobe Illustrator, those Bezier tools are probably a little bit better for this. But I'm just going to be very rough and quick in Photoshop here. So holding shift will constrain your line to either the horizontal or vertical axis. So you might want to do that for some of these. Okay, I'll just draw a line along here, and now I can merge all of these different shapes and roast ize them as well. And I'll erase out the parts I don't need. Right. So I'm being very simple, very rough with this. If you want to, you can be very precise. Use Bezier tools like the pen tool and stuff like that. It doesn't really matter in this case that much because this is a one off project. I'm not going to be using this sort of pattern a bunch of times. Of course, when you're working on a project where you're going to be using the same thing, several times, you may want to use, you know, proper vector tools to do this instead, and then you can scale those symbols up as much as you like and have a little bit more control and stuff like that. In this case, it's a one off, so I don't care that much. And I'm just going to rush through this and, you know, if you're doing the same thing as me, then I don't see any real reason to go ahead and put all the work or making properly with vectors and all of that stuff. Just go ahead and try and draw this out as neatly as you can, Photoshop. But if it's a little bit rough around the edges, that's okay too. Because I don't think it'll be that noticeable in this case. I think there's a little line that connects these two parts, so I'll just draw that in. Now I'll use the fill tool to fill these in. This one has a split down the middle I just remembered. Two circles go in here as well. If you turn auto select on, it will move around whatever you touch with the move tool. So I can make these things a little bit faster. Now I'll rasterize these two layers or first I'll erase these lines, make sure it fits. If it does, so now I can merge all these. And fill them in. Now to sort of round off the edges of all of these, I can go ahead and add or instead of add. I'll duplicate this layer just so I don't ruin anything, go to filter and do the same thing I've done in substance painter already. So under blur, I can apply a Gaussian blur and nothing too much. So radius of five pixels will probably do. And then I can add levels. And if you hold alt and click on this little line, you will apply the effect only to that layer. Now I can sort of bring this because I'm not doing anything. I just deleted the levels and apply them again and now it's working for some reason. I think what I did was I accidentally filled the mask in with black, don't do that. I can adjust these numbers to just have a round edge around all of the edges, which is a little bit nicer than just having things end sharply. It cleans up any of the little messy bits that were left over from me just manually erasing things. I think this is looking quite nice. I'm not going to harden the edges too much just because this a little bit of blur around the edges is acting like aliasing and stopping stuff from getting pixelated like this. So I'll leave it like that, and now I'll save this. And you can just save it as a PSD and that will import into substance painted just fine. So I'm just going to import this texture to the project only. I'm not going to import it to my library. That's because I'm only going to really need this for this one project. So here's the offer. And what I'm going to use to paint this onto the mesh is a stencil. I'm going to add another paint layer, turn down the opacity on this one, just so I can barely see it. And I'll paint into this layer now. So use the projection tool. Go down to the Alpha channel here and just drag the thing you saved actually down here into this gray scale box. This Alpha is the actual shape of your brush that you're using. Now, the shortcuts for the projection tool are a little bit tricky for me to remember. But if you hold down S, you can sort of manipulate it around. And if you hold and right click, you can rotate stuff while holding S or actually, you don't need to hold S. I don't, you do. You need to at least hold S, then click, and then you can rotate stuff around. And I So to move the stencil around, you just hold S, and then right click will scale it up and down. Left click will rotate it around, and middle click will just move it around. And you can also just move your TD your TD or your three D view around the stencil to achieve the sort of same effect, although rotating might be a little bit harder in the three D view. So, you know, use both, whichever makes more sense in the situation. So I'm going to try and line this up with the little mask that I've already drawn out. And I'll see how this works. So I think that all work quite well. I've set the color mode to overlay, sort of still have some of the color variation from below show through. And I've also set it to a slightly lower opacity. Now, what I might want to try is to sort of have this pattern sort of go in and out with the actual leave of the fabric. I'm not sure if that'll look great, but it's something I want to try to sort of feather out the edge of this and make it look a little bit more printed on and not so harsh around the edges. So what I can try and do is add an anchor point to this base layer. And this will just basically let me reference part of the base layer wherever I want to. So here, I'll add a fill layer, not a filter, a fill layer. And if I click on the grayscale button, you can see that I can select anchor points, and I can select the anchor point I put on the base layer, and you can choose which color to effect. So if I take a look at my mask now, now it's referencing the base color, and this is actually the one I want to reference, but you can see that you can access all of the different layers. So I'm going to get the base color and I'm going to set this to multiply. Or rather let's see. All I want to do is sort of feather the mask in and out here. So what I want to do is move the fill layer under the paint. And that way, I can sort of have this as the base and then have the paint layer on top of it, sort of add to it. So if I set this to something like overlay or maybe screen, multiply. You can see that it's working, but I think I need another paint layer on top of this, so I'll duplicate this effect. With this first layer, I'm sort of masking out this effect. That's not really working because if I take a look at the actual stencil, I sort of only painted out this area. So what I need to do is, let's see. I'll set this one to darken. I'll have to paint around the sides a little bit later. But I'll set this on to darken and then I'll put this layer on top with maybe a let's see a linear dodge, then maybe if I turn down the opacity a little bit, it's not quite working. Okay, so I figured out what I want to do. I need to put the fill. So this fill is the anchor point from the base layers base color. And I want to take that fill, and I want to put it underneath my stencil, and I'll set this to darken or you can use multiply. It doesn't really matter. And then I'll duplicate this paint, and I'll set this one to color dodge. And you can see that's given me this kind of edge that lines up with the pattern of the underlying fabric. So I think that looks pretty good. If I increase the intensity, that's a little bit much. So in order to get a little bit control over the jaggedness of that edge, I'll duplicate this effect again, and I'll set this one just to lighten. And then Oops. And by moving this slider up and down, I can sort of increase or decrease the intensity of that edge. And I can also add a very subtle blur to all of this. And when I say very subtle, I mean stuff like 0.01 and such. So let me compare this to just the paint without anything added. So I'll duplicate this layer. And I'll put it on top. Okay. So this is the effect. You know, with all of these changes, don't look around here. I'm going to have to paint that out in a second, but you can see this edge has a little bit of feathering to it and that I feel like gives the impression that this is printed on and, you know, not just very harsh edged shape, right? And if I hide all of these layers underneath, or maybe if I just set this one to normal instead. So see how much harder that edge is. I feel like just this little bit of jaggedness that follows along with the actual fabric pattern underneath helps it blend in with stuff a little bit more. So that's why I've done all of these layers. Now I'm going to add a paint and sort of paint out all of the stuff around it. So I'll just use the polygon film mode. And I'll box select everything around the letters. This area I will just paint out by hand because I don't want to accidentally select too many polygons. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. I just need to turn down the opacity a little bit. That looks pretty close to what I have in the concept. I'll also add a bit of a different roughness to this area, so maybe something more rough compared to the other stuff. And that'll help break up the surface a little bit more as well. Okay, let's see what's next. I think that pretty much covers the base fabric of the pants. I may want to play with the roughness value a little bit, actually, if I look at the roughness now, I don't think there's that much variation in here. So I'm going to see if there's any options to adjust this in the base layer. There doesn't really seem to be anything in the actual material options. So what you can do in that case is add a filter to the base color and not the mask channel, and then just I'll click on the roughness to only affect the roughness with this filter. Actually, it's not a filter I want to add. It's just the levels there and set the affected channel to roughness. Now let me take a look at my roughness map. And I want to dial this in just so the indented parts are a little bit more rough. Okay. And I don't want to make this too extreme because that will look a little bit odd as well. So maybe something like this will work. And I think it is working, but I've made everything else a little bit too shiny. So I'm going to knock down the highest value. And let's take a look at this. Hang on. I think I've been doing this the wrong way round. Uh, yeah. Okay. I keep getting confused and forgetting, like an idiot that the darker something is, the rougher it is. So I think I did this the wrong way round. Let me invert this here. Okay. So I'll reset it and do this over again. Another thing you can do instead of just playing with these sliders. I'm not really getting anything anywhere with that. So instead, I'll add a filter to the contrast. And I'll just up the contrast. Okay. Why is that not doing anything? So I've jumped ahead here a bit until the point where I'm happy with this roughness. So you can see that the cavities sort of are slightly rougher and aren't picking up the highlight as much as the other areas. So it's adding a little bit more detail and a little bit more surface variation to this. I'll show you the roughness channel. You can see that. It just has a little bit more contrast. And I went back to just using the levels instead of trying to dial in the contrast because the levels gave me the most control and work the best. So all I did was I pulled the lowest dark value up. Now, dark is shiny, in this case. I got a little bit confused there and inverted it, but yeah, dark is shiny. So I pulled that up a bit and I've pulled the midpoint and the light value there as well. That just basically increases the contrast, and then I've made, you know, make sure that the cavities are a little bit rougher, so that's pretty much all I want to do when it comes to this main pants material. Now let me take a look at the concept, see what I have to do next. I need to get the zippers in, but I think I'll sort out the fabric panels over here right now. Actually, for the pockets, what I think I'll do is I'll use the same material. So let me copy this base material. And I'm going to paste it into the pockets folder. Now I could instance it if I wanted the exact same material, but I want it to be slightly different. So I'm going to paste it in here. You do have to make sure that you don't use too many different materials on whatever you're working on. Because it's kind of atypical for every single panel of fabric to be a different material. That's why I'm using the same material for the sort of pocket panel as I am for the main part of the pants. I feel like if I just start putting different materials in every single panel, it'll start looking a bit strange. So I'm going with the same material. I'll just change the color. So let me go ahead and color pick this. I'm not sure about this reddish tone. Let me pick that again. Let me pick from the little color palette over here. I like this bluish color. I think what I'll do is I'll lighten up the gradient towards the top here a bit. Let me find the gradient. And I'm just going to lower the opacity instead of editing the color. I think that's enough. I'll up the pocket slightly, as well. I feel like it's a little bit too dark right now. And I'll ever so slightly lower the saturation as well. Let me try with more beige color and see how that looks because I'm getting the impression that this is kind of beige, really. Of course, colors are relative, so, you know, just because it looks beige in the concept to me, doesn't mean that it actually is you saw when I color picked, it came out as a sort of reddish color. I'm just really trying a few different colours and seeing what I like. So I'll try that more yellowish tone and a more bluish one. I think because the rest of the pants are kind of bluish, I'll stick with the yellowish one that makes it pop a little bit more. But I feel like this is a way too intense. So I'll lower the saturation. Because it's right next to a bluish area, that means any sort of warm tone is exaggerated here, in fact. Even without any warmth, any warm tone, this already looks like a little bit yellowish to me. So I'll have this level, this very low at a very low value, something like that. I'll lower or increase the value rather slightly. Maybe I'll put it down a tiny bit. Okay. I'll stick with that for now. I've noticed that I need to rotate this panel around because the weave here is in the wrong direction, so I'll do that in a minute. Let me sort out the inside of this area right now. So I feel like this mesh material might work quite well for this outer thigh area. You might want a kind of breathable material there in terms of, you know, having a little bit of surf this variation and explaining why a different type of fabric has been put in there. So I'm going to try and download this and see how this works. So I've imported the material I downloaded the same way I imported the last one, and now I'm dragging it into the folder I made for the inset part of the pants. So I'm going to up the scale to something like what I need. In this case, I went with ten, and that seemed to work perfectly, so I didn't tweak it anymore from there. The other thing I want to do is I want to tone down this secondary color that is in the little holes in the mesh, to something a little bit closer to the main color because I don't want that much variation. I want this whole part to look a little bit more gray and a little bit more even. So I'm just going to go into the color picker and lower the value a little bit, so it's closer to the rest of the pant. And I'm going to go ahead and pick out the main color. So I tried color picking from a concept, and you can see this obviously isn't working just because, you know, colors are very related to each other when you see them. So if you have a blue next to a red, it changes the way you see all of those different colors. So color picking from drawings won't always work out, color picking straight from the concept. So you have to adjust these things yourself and see what is working on your model in the three D view. In this case, I went with a slightly darker color, something like this, and I may tweak it a little bit more later. Another good idea is to check your base color channel if everything is cohesive and working in there and not just look at the late view all of the time. Next thing I want to do is adjust the depth of all of these little holes on this material. I want to make them a little bit deeper, have a little bit more contrast in here. Now, unfortunately, this material doesn't actually come with anything in the height channel. All of this height detail is stored in the normal channel. So it's a little bit harder to adjust. I can't just use a slider or add levels filter onto this to adjust the height. You can't really edit normals as easily. So I'm going to have to work around this and basically use the roughness map as a base for a height map in another layer. So I'm going to add an anchor point to this layer, and then I'll make another layer on top, and I'm just going to leave the height channel in this layer, and I'll add a black mask and then add a fill, and then pick this anchor point that I just added to the previous layer. Now I'm going to set it to the roughness channel. Or in this case, yeah, the roughness channel. And I'm going to try and play with the levels until I can get something that more or less looks like the height map that I want. So I want to increase the contrast a little bit, so I'm only masking off the little holes. And then I can add a height value to this. So in this case, I need a negative height value because I want to pull them inwards a little bit. So that's adding a little bit of height detail here, and that's one of the ways you can work around not having one of the maps. You can try and get a height map out of a base color or out of a roughness map as long as you know, you have something to work with there, as long as the roughness map corresponds with the details you want to use or at least the base color or something like that. So remember we can always work around stuff and try and use other maps for different things and try and adjust them to get them to work. So, in this case, I've taken the roughness channel, and I'm using that as a mask for the height. And I've sort of increased the contrast here. So it's just those little holes that are getting masked out and then are having a lower height value applied to them. And this seems to be working fairly well. Sometimes, of course, you just won't have a roughness or a base color or any other map that corresponds to the details you need to mask out for a height map or something else. So sometimes you just have nothing to work with. And in those cases, it's a little bit trickier and you either have to, you know, make something in Photoshop or something else or just pick a different texture or material. Now I'm adding a slight blur just to clean up some of the pixelation that has arisen from me, you know, compressing the levels a lot. So, you know, if you squash the height range or the value range of a texture down, you will get a little bit of pixelation around the edges, and you can just use a blur to slightly alleviate that and make it a little bit lighter. So that's what I did there. Now you can see that the masking for this whole material group isn't perfect. There's a little bit of the pant material that is around the edges here. And that's because, you know, the UVs are split up based along the edges of the low poly and the low poly is low poly, so I only have a certain amount of topology to work with. And that doesn't always line up with the high poly perfectly because it's a lower poly than the high poly. So I'm going to have to go through and paint around all of the edges here just to get this mask to be lining up perfectly with the actual, you know, boundary between these two materials on the high poly. So all I need to do is brush around the boundary where these two materials meet and, you know, just clean up the edge of this mask, basically. Sometimes it's easier to paint in the two D view than it is in the three D view. When you're painting in the two D view, make sure you've set your alignment to UV, and that will basically treat your two D view as a canvas, and it won't try and project your brush onto the three DVe. It'll be a lot more accurate that way. So make sure you have it set to UV alignment when you're painting in the two D view and tangent wrap when you're painting in the three D view. All I've done here is put down a bright red color so I can see the exact edge of what I'm masking off here because it's a little bit hard to see gray on gray. Now I'm trying to clean up this edge, and my brush is doing something really weird. So I'm just going to go ahead and go over to the brush panel and reselect the brush I'm using. I'll just clean up what I just did. And now I'll go to the brush panel and pick out a hard round brush and just try brushing around the edge again. And now it's coming out clean. So I'm not sure what was going on there. I think I had the same brush selected, but it was behaving strangely. So maybe I had some sort of scattering option turned on or something like that. So yeah, this is very straightforward. Not much to say here. I'm just going around all of the edges and making sure that they line up with, you know, what is on the high poly. And don't be too sloppy with this, you know, paint within the lines and do a good job of cleaning this up. You don't have to be super obsessive and, you know, pixel precise, but, you know, try and get it looking proper. So like I said earlier, sometimes these things are easier to do in the two D view than they are in a three D view. You just have to decide, you know, what's working when and make sure that you have the alignment set properly. So when you're painting in a three DVew tangent wrap works best. Sometimes camera projection works well as well. But usually, I have it set to tangent wrap. So that will sort of wrap it to the tangent of the surface of the mesh, as I'm aware. I'm not an expert, but that makes sense to me. And then when you're painting in the two Dview, make sure it's set to you via alignment. Um because if it's not set to UV alignment, what it will basically do is it will detect where your brush is on the two D view and then sort of figure out where that is in the three D view, and it will try and tangent wrap from that point to the UV map. You know, it'll basically just tangent wrap from that point. So And sometimes that can result in unexpected behavior when you're trying to paint, especially if you have overlapping areas, and that's usually going to be why you're in the two D view because something is overlapping with something else. So yeah, be aware that can be really frustrating if you don't know that option. The little alignment drop down menu and what it does. So I'm almost finished with this side of this panel, and then I'll have to repeat this process, you know, on the way back up for the other side of this panel and then do everything all over again for the other leg. So it does take a little bit of time to clean up these masks. But you can see it makes the result look nicer when you don't have, you know, visible faceting between the edges of two materials. So, you know, take your time and do clean up these masks. Have the following around the shape of the actual normal map as opposed to just the polygons. You don't always have to do this. Sometimes, you know, the masks look perfectly fine without this extra level of adjustment, but in this case, it definitely felt necessary, especially around the top. There were some very large gaps. Down here around the side, it's less visible, and I could also just fill that gap in with maybe some extra ambient occlusion to sort of hide it a little bit more. Now you can see that my brush is kind of lagging behind what I'm drawing. And that's because I've accidentally got it set to UV alignment instead of tangent space. And, you know, that sort of slows down the brush because it's trying to figure out what it's drawing on the three D model and then sort of project it in the UV space. So it's doing extra work to sort of figure this extra stuff out. And that's where the brush is slower. And I had it set to this by accident. What I should have done is set it to tangent wrap like I'm doing right now. So you can see that it's much nicer and smoother when I have it set to tangent wrap, and that's why it's important to know, keep an eye on that setting. So that's the mask pretty much done. Maybe a few little tweaks here and there I can still do. Like this edge here is a little bit rough, but that probably wouldn't be visible with the final material applied. So I can turn off this red material and take a look at the final result, and you can see that there is still kind of a seam there in that area. And the reason is because this is being projected into DV, and there is a seam along there where there are two different UV islands, so that texture is getting projected with different offsets in those two areas. So, you know, there's no real way to fix this without changing the actual way it's being projected. So you can find the projection panel here on the sort of main menu of the fill layer, and you can change the way it's projected. So triplanar projection, I've mentioned earlier, it will project the texture from all three different directions and then sort of blend around the edges. So triplanar projection is working a little bit better here, and because it's not relying on the UV view, it's not affected by those seams in the UVs. But the thing is the triplanar projection here is basically behaving like a planar projection because these legs more or less just face to the side, so they're only getting projected from one side. So in this case, I may as well just use a planar projection. Now, the planar projection only projects from one direction. Right now, it's projecting from the front. I can rotate the projection around using the little rotation tool. You can find at the top tool bar. I'm going to line this up with the front of my model. And once it's lined up, which can be a little bit tricky to get right. So I think it's lined up now. You can see that this is giving me the exact same result as the triplanar projection. So if the thing you need to project to is relatively flat, you can just use this and it's absolutely fine. I probably could have gotten away with UV projection since the seams are just around the edges and they're not very visible in my case. So, you know, if seams are pretty subtle and you can't really tell unless you really zoom in, you can just use them. Now I'm just showing off a slightly newer option, which is warp projection. And you can use this if you have a somewhat irregular shape that is hard to project to. So what this gives you is a sort of lattice that you can deform that it will project the texture from. So if you go to this drop down menu at the top, you can find the edit vertices option, and that will let you push and pull the individual vertices that make this lattice up and you can sort of position them around the object you're trying to project to. And that can help if you have an irregularly shaped object that's hard to project to with a planar projection or any other of the projection modes. So this is really useful, but it's not something I need in my case. So I'm not going to use this now. I'm just going to use the planar projection because that seemed to work really well. So I'm going to stick with this. Now if I zoom in closely, I can actually see that the normal map from the underlying layer is sort of poking through, and it is visible, and it's contributing to that sort of seam that I can still see on the model. So I want to go ahead and clean up the mask for the underlying layer as well to get rid of this issue. You can see that it's very obvious if I go to the normal channel and take a look at it. So I want to get rid of that little overlap between these materials. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the paint layer that I just made in the mask to clean up the mask for this layer and I'm going to paste it into the mask for the underlying layer. So if I just paste this in, you can see that it doesn't immediately do what I want it to, right? Because I painted this paint layer for the layer that's on top to expand the mask out a little bit for that layer. So I can easily fix this just by changing the blending mode on this layer. So right now you can see that it's not doing what I want because, of course, I painted in a white value there. But what I need to do is set it to subtract, and that will basically subtract all of the areas that are white from the layer below it. And you can see that this is giving me the exact result that I want. So remember, when you're painting these masks, you can sort of copy paste these layers around and play with the different blending modes to get the result that you need. And now you can see that I don't have any overlapping edges between these two materials. So now that the mask is completely cleaned up on this leg, I'm going to go ahead and repeat the exact same process for the other leg. Now, I don't think you guys need to see me do the exact same thing twice, so I'm going to save you a little bit of time and cut that out of the footage because it's literally me doing the exact same thing that I just did here. So anything's unclear, just go ahead and rewind and watch it again. But yeah, I'll be skipping ahead in the footage to after I've cleaned up the mask for the other leg. So don't be alarmed by that. And with that, that's going to be the end for this chapter. So roughly halfway through cleaning up the sort of or doing the first pass on the body material. And yeah, thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 77. 09 Body Material Creation Part04: Hello, and welcome to Chapter nine of texturing. So in this chapter, I'm continuing work on this little fabric inset area on the pants. And what I want to do now is add a little bit of highlight detail, very similar to what I did for the rest of the pants. So it's going to be based off the curlature mainly so just a little bit of highlighting to make this look a little bit softer and apply sort of a little bit of an impression of wear and tear or something like that. So I'm adding the anchor point from the base color of this material or not necessarily the base color, but I'm just adding the anchor point that I made from this material to the mask because I want to mask out the little holes, these little round holes in this material from any sort of curvature highlight detail I'm going to be applying. So I only want this to be applied to the raised dark gray areas and then have the little internal holes masked out. That will make any sort of highlighting that I add appear less flat and make it look more like it's an actual part of the material. So I'm going to play with the mask until all of these little round inset areas are sort of pretty much black and masked off. So I can try using either the base color or the roughness map. And I think the roughness map is going to work a little bit better for me because there is a little bit more range in the roughness map that lets me sort of get it working with the slides a little bit better. So as always, try all of the different available maps that you have. If you just have a height map, that's probably your best port of call. You know, the height map is going to give you the exact information that you want. In this case, this material doesn't come with a height map, so I sort of have to make do with either roughness or base color. And I feel like the roughness sort of more or less gave me the result I needed. I'm adding a blur layer on top as usual to get rid of a little bit of this pixelation and make it slightly less harsh. And I'm just using a very low value, so it just barely blows out the pixels here. I don't want to be blowing this out too much. Okay, so that's going to be the base of this mask. You can see that all of the little holes are masked out. Now, I'm changing the actual blending mode of this layer, and the issue here is that doesn't show up when I'm recording from my display tablet. That menu pops up on my other screen, and it doesn't get recorded. So I'm just letting you guys know that, you know, I am actually going ahead and changing the blending mode of this layer. It's just not showing up on screen. The little drop down menu that appears is popping up on my other monitor. That's why you can't see it. But as you can see, the blending mode changed. So I'm not using a shortcut or anything here. It's just that that pop up pops up on my other monitor, and I'm not sure if there's any other way to, you know, get it to pop up on the same monitor. It's kind of a weird issue, and I'm not sure why it happens whenever I try and record something on my display tablet, but, you know, it's something that unfortunately, you're going to have to deal with. So just be aware that I did change the blending mode just from normal to screen. And now I've applied a curvature generator. And I'm going into the mask view so I can sort of tweak this so it's masking off exactly what I want. Now I'm setting the blending mode on the curvature generator to multiply. And again, that popped up on my second monitor, so it didn't get recorded, but I changed the blending mode on the actual curvature generator layer in the mask. And now I'm just messing with these sliders. I really only want the fine detail, and I don't want too much of the larger details. But, you sort of have to slide them all around to see what exactly it is that you need and what works. So I think something like this is what I want. I'm going to go back to the material view, and I think this is working quite well. It's really making this sort of material look a little bit softer and a little bit like maybe it's brushed up against some stuff and maybe gathered some dust or something like that. So this is the impression that I'm going for. Now I'm going to increase the roughness on these areas so that they're a little bit more rough compared to everything else because that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make it look like these parts are a little bit more worn. Because they're, you know, raised up or more curved. And the last thing to do is sort of dial in the opacity value because right now it's a little bit too intense. So I'm going to go ahead and lower this quite slightly just so it's barely visible. But it is adding a little bit of that softness. I feel like, you know, so if I turn it off and off again, that's something you want to try as well, you know, as you're working, make sure you flick layers on and off again just to check if they're actually helping. Now, right here, you can see that because this area is quite raised or, you know, quite parallel to the projection plane that I projected this texture from, it's kind of getting stretched a bit in that area. Now, I feel like I can probably get away with the stretching in that one singular spot. It's not too bad. And, you know, it's not uncommon for models to have a little bit of, you know, stretch or a little bit of junk in one spot, but it may be something that I will want to clean up, but that's something I would leave for the final pass on this material. Right now, I'm just going to leave it and get back to it later. Again, like I said, this is sort of first pass on the body. So I want to get everything kind of like 75% done. What I'm adding here is another layer to add a little bit of breakup and some sort of like speckling to this entire piece of fabric to sort of add in some black and white spots that will sort of help add a little bit of surface variation, so it doesn't look so uniform and tiled. So I'm looking for a grunge texture that might work for this. So I'm probably going to go with one of these dirt textures like dirt four, for example. And I'm just going to drag that into the fill layer of this mask, and I'm going to increase the scale to something quite small. I want this to look like very high frequency speckling, something that might arise from just variation in thread color or stuff like that. You know, it's something you do see on fabric. It's really a single uniform color. It's always, you know, little dots of slightly different colors depending on how the fabric is dyed, as well. If it's dyed after being woven, then the color is more consistent. Also depends on the type of fred, I guess. I'm not an expert on textiles, but it's something you see, right? A little bit of speckling in the sort of color of the fabric. And I'm going to add another fill layer because I tiled the last one quite a lot, what you can do to sort of break up the tiling of one texture is to add another texture on top and sort of subtract them from each other or blend them in a different way to sort of get them to break each other up, and that will reduce the amount of tiling you can see. So I'm adding a higher frequency dirt texture over the top of this one, and I'm using multiply to subtract it from the bottom one, and that's breaking this one up even more. So now I'm just going to change the blending mode of this layer to screen to see if it looks a little bit better. I just thought I'd try that and see if that helps. So I think it does, and I'm going to turn down the opacity quite low so this doesn't overpower the curvature detail I added on the last layer. And I'm going to add another fill, and I'm going to use that anchor point from this very same layer so I can subtract out the little inset holes once more because I don't want this speckling getting applied across the whole thing because these are sort of like, you know, it's a slightly layered material. So if you apply another layer that goes across both of the different levels of this material, then, you know, it makes it look a little bit too uniform. So instead of that, I'm going to, you know, subtract out those little holes, and that will sort of help give the impression that this is actually, you know, more realistic. So I'm going to use the roughness channel here. Once more. I feel like the roughness channel works best. It has the most information from it, and, you know, it has the largest range of values, which let's do more of it. You can see just on the graph there, the curve is much wider compared to the base color one. So I'm pretty much doing the same thing as I did for the last layer. And in fact, if you wanted to, you could just copy paste the effect from that layer, and you would get the same result. So I'm going to set the blending mode of this to multiply, and that will sort of darken those little holes but leave the lighter areas still light. So if I take a look at the mask view, you can't see it too well, but if you zoom out a bit, you can definitely see the pattern of these little holes that have been cut out of the texture. So this is working fairly well, I feel like, so I'm just going to leave the color and the roughness channels for now, and I'm going to turn the roughness up quite high again, just because I want these dots to be rougher than the surrounding area. Now, in terms of color, you could just use a flat color, but one thing I find sometimes help that helps add more color variation to parts is to add a colored texture into any sort of grunges you're adding. And this colored texture doesn't really have to correspond to what you're working on. It's just something to add a little bit of color variation. So anything that sort of has a sort of rough, noisy pattern to it with a few different colors in it, and, you know, I'm going to keep the effect quite subtle, barely noticeable, but it will add a few, you know, stray colors, a few different colors that helps things look a little bit more varied and a little bit better. So in some cases, you know, you can be more or less subtle. Of course, the more grungy, the more dirty something is, I feel like the more freedom you have to play with color variation and, you know, just muck around with stuff in general. Here, it's a very clean model. So it is a bit of a challenge to texture stuff like this because you kind of have to keep things fairly uniform. That's why I'm going to try and take every opportunity I can to add some very subtle variation. So I'm going to drag this rust texture into the base color. And again, I don't care that it is rust. I don't care what it belongs to. This is going to be broken up and so small that you're not going to be able to tell what it was originally. I'm purely just using this texture for the actual variation in color. And it doesn't even have to be the same color or a similar color to what you're working on because you can always change the color with a hue shift adjustment. So I'm playing with the different blending modes for the base color to see if something can make those colors show up a little bit more strongly. And I find it pretty tricky to predict, which blending is going to do what aside from the main few. What multiply does is fairly obvious. It usually makes stuff darker. Then the lighten and the darkened blending modes also do those things, and I can sort of guess what overlay will do. But a lot of these other ones, you know, they're a bit trickier to figure out exactly how the thing is going to end up looking. So a lot of the time, it's just trial and error, going through the list of different blending modes and trying all of them. I definitely can't predict what a lot of these are going to look like once I've said it to that. So I ended up sticking with normal because it seems to get the color across the best. And now I'm going to add a filter to sort of adjust the color of this texture to be closer to the, you know, subject matter that I'm actually applying it to. So right now it's, you know, a kind of rusty orange color, and that maybe doesn't make a huge amount of sense when contrasted with, you know, this being a gray piece of fabric. So I'm going to use this to slightly hue shift this towards a more bluish tone or maybe just something that fits with this gray better. So green definitely isn't what I want to go for. And I don't really want a pink or a reddish tone, either. So I'm going to go with this blue color, but I'm going to lower the opacity of the HSL effect, just so it's not making it too blue. I kind of actually maybe preferred the original color to this blue, but I'm just going to keep this with a slightly lower opacity and go with it. So you can see how much extra breakup this is adding to this material instead of having it be very flat. Usually when you're doing adjustments to the base color, it's a good idea to be in the base color view because that gives you the best idea of what's actually happening to the texture. The material view with all of the shading applied can sort of not give you the best impression. So here's the result, and it's very subtle when you look at the material view. You can barely tell I've done anything, but it's definitely adding up a lot of breakup and making it look less tiled than it was before. So you can see that this folds layer is putting a very harsh sort of edge around some of these areas where the height map is sort of higher up than the surrounding areas. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a paint layer here and just sort of brush around with a very soft brush around the edges here. I'm going to find the brush and find the basic soft brush and start brushing around the edges to clean up this height map a little bit. Okay. So you can see that was way too hard of a stroke. Need to find the brush options and probably lower the opacity quite a bit. So I'm going to turn on flow pressure sensitivity and turn off size pressure sensitivity, and I'll lower the opacity by half. Now you can see I can sort of slowly brush away the issue. If I take a look at the mask, you can see that's what the issue was, right? It's adding this height detail, and then the height detail really falls off where the pocket starts, and that's not something I want. Now, another way to approach this is if I take a look at the mask, the sort of main value here is gray, and that means that a little bit of height is being added across the entire model. And instead, it might be better to have most of this value as black. So I'm going to go ahead and add a levels modifier here and sort of squeeze this range down quite a bit. You can hit the autob and it sort of do most of the work for you. So I want the main value really here to be blank. Now, if I take a look at the material, you can see that the folds have become a little bit more harsh as I've clamped these values, you know, squeeze them down a little bit. So I can just lower the height intensity a little bit. And now it's basically looking like it did before, but there's going to be less of a step up here. But I still need to go in and paint around the edges. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Actually, I might switch to a softer brush because this basic soft isn't very soft, and I can use something like, maybe this cement brush, it's a little bit softer, so I'm going to go with this one. Even though the edge is kind of jagged, that, you know, might actually help blend things together. And what I'm trying to get rid of is the siryhard edge. So that's helping a little bit. I need to do a little bit more painting on the mask over here. I'll do this in a separate paint layer. I'm painting on the wrong layer here. I need to paint into the main folder, so you go. Now, because it's hard to get stuff to overlap perfectly, what I'll do is something I showed on one of the materials at the start, and that is add sort of base color underneath everything to make sure that there's no white gaps. Because you can see that there's a little bit of a gap here, and I could go in and sort of paint this area up and bring these edges together. But, you know, I'd have to do that for everything, and, you know, sometimes there are going to be gaps that you overlook. And if you don't want to spend hours and hours cleaning all of these up, it helps to just sort of have this basecat that's slightly darker, and it goes over everything. And I usually have the roughness extremely low on these. And I just leave all of these other channels blank. Okay. So back to the pocket now that all of these are fixed up, I can go ahead and add a bit of a curvature layer. So I'll add a black mask to this one, and I'll add a generator. I'll set this to screen, and I'll lower the opacity slightly, and I'll dial in the CV set to what I needed to be. So this is really harsh up at the top there. Definitely don't want it to be that harsh. So I'll go ahead and paint it down a bit. Sometimes, you do need to go in and manually tweak things. You're not always going to be able to get the perfect mask out. Yes. And I'll turn down the roughness here, I'll turn it up, and I'll get rid of the other layers. Now, I'll try and add in a little bit of ambient occlusion around the edges here. And I'm going to put this into the base color as well. Now, there's no AO channel here I can add to, so I need to go in and add an ambient occlusion channel to this material. So you can find that under tetraset settings and this little plus icon ambien occlusion. And now I can add an ambient occlusion to this and I'll set to a dark value because I want to darken the ambient occlusion here. And I'll add a black mask and I'll add a generator, and I'll see what the ambient occlusion generator does. So let's take a look at the mask. There is a little bit of ambien occlusion around the edges, so this should work. Thirst, I'm going to invert it. This is giving me much closer to the result I actually want. You can see that this ambien occlusion is really helping quite a bit here. And yeah, sometimes you have to add this to the base color if you really need to get it to show up because you're not always going to have enough ambient occlusion just from the ambient occlusion. Sometimes, it helps to put it in the base color. I'm going to add a paint here as well because it's a little bit dark around this sharp crease. And I'll set the blending mode to multiply, and I'll lower the opacity a little bit. Okay, so this pocket is popping quite well now. And I'm going to go ahead and load the opacity of the ambien oclusion being applied because it's a little bit much right now. This is the opacity channel. I need to pick ambien oclusion. Okay. So that's that. I'll add that little bit of color variation to this, as well. And maybe I'll add a bit of color to this. So same thing I did for the pants, basically, adding a bunch of noise. So I'll look for a nice noisy texture in here. I can use this fractal sum. This time, you don't really have to pick a different texture every time, though. Maybe something like this at a very small scale will work well. Something like biscale and I'll up contrast. And I'll set this to, uh. Let's see. Maybe there's something better. Okay. So this is adding something that's pretty much already there in the original texture. There is color variation. So I want to sort of break this up, so I'll add another fill. And this time, I'll pick something that sort of has a lower frequency to it. So something like this that will break that texture up. Like so. Then I'll set this to multiply. I'll lower the opacity a little bit. Oops. There we go. And I'll lower the overall opacity a bit more. And I'll also change the color of this to something, let's see. That seems to be doing it. So before and after, you can see there's just that nice little extra bit of variation. This looks a little bit intense, though, so I'll sit this down to maybe 7%. So this breakup is pretty important when you're working with clean fabrics. Okay, that's the pants, the bottom half of the pants or, you know, the pants in general are getting close to being done. Going to clean up this label now. So this label has some sort of writing on it, but I can't quite see because the resolution is pretty low in the concept, and I can't find a higher resolution. So I'm just going to have to make something up here. I just went ahead and did a little doodle in Photoshop. So because this is much smaller in scale, I didn't bother using any of the line tools or anything like that. I just went out and drew this all in one layer very quickly, and, you know, I didn't record this for you guys because it's very straightforward. I mean, you know how to use a brush in Photoshop, and you know how to, you know, there's nothing for me to teach you when it comes to doodling something out in Photoshop. So I'm going to go ahead and save this as a PSD. And I've gone ahead and imported it into substance painter. So I'm going to use the projector or projection tool, and I'll use this, and I'll drag that alpha into the projection tool and go ahead and line up with the model. So maybe something like that, see how it looks. I think that looks pretty okay, especially from a distance. Now, what I can do to make this look a little bit better is maybe indented a little bit, so it looks stamped on or maybe having it a little bit raised, it looks even better. Yeah, that definitely helps a tiny bit. Maybe this is a bit much, so I'll set it to 0.03. Yeah, that's a bit better. And let's see what should I do with the roughness have it very Maybe having it contrast with the surrounding material not be as rough is pretty nice here. And I don't really need any of the other layers. There's a little white corner square there as well, so I'll paint that in. And let me just get the round brush. Okay. Okay, I think it's a little bit more rectangular. Maybe this look better. Let's see. Yeah, I think that's working quite well. So I need to clean up the edges of this a little bit as well. So let's see if I add a filter and do a mask outline. And I set it to, let's see both or inside. I have to set it to outside, and then I lower the width to be extremely low. I sort of outline outside the mask. This works sometimes, but it doesn't always work. So right now I'm using the ten blending mode. Hang on. Let me see the mask here. Okay, so there is a little bit of a Yeah, this isn't working. I'm obviously just going to have to hand paint this. Sometimes that can work, though in different cases. In this case, it did not. So just painting will be the best way to fix this. So go ahead and paint around the edge. Okay, so actually, it looks like the issue is there's a layer on top that's doing this. So let me check all of the other layers. That's weird. I'm not sure what's going on here and why I'm getting that white patch right here. Oh, I think I know why. It's simply not included in this color selection. So if I add a paint layer on top of this, if I check the mask as well. Yeah, this edge just isn't in the main mask for the entirety of the pants, so I need to go ahead and paint this in, and that's gone ahead and fixed it. Let me just check the mask. We go fixed. Now I can go back and start to tweak this. Okay, so that's the edge cleaned up. Maybe this area is still a little bit rough. Okay, so I need to go to the pockets mask and add a little bit here. There we go. Now, I feel like I want this to sort of sit in the surface a little bit more, so I would like a sort of height map around it. But maybe that's something I'll do when I do my final pass. So I'll carry on working on the actual rubber part. So I want to add some roughness variations, so I'm just going to add a roughness layer and search for a nice grunge in here. Something like this one, I feel. I'll add a black mask and a fill. Now, you can just drag textures into the roughness. But I'm not a fan of that because that only gives you the bounce and the contrast to play with. I prefer to put it into the mask. Let me check out the roughness channel now. I'll scale up this mask or tie it more rather. And let's see how this looks. Adding a little bit of a difference in reflections here. I think the base roughness is a little bit high, I would say. Let me also add a little bit of cage and detail around the edges as usual. I'll add a generator for the curvature or instead, you know what? I'll show you the smart masks. Here are the smart masks in this panel, and this is basically a generator already set up with a bunch of options, and this will give you a bit of a head start when you're trying to figure out a nice mask for something like roughness or color or rust or whatever. Let's see what might work well for this part. Probably something like dust plastic because it is kind of like a rubbery plasticky part. So let's see what the roughness looks like here. And if I go into the mask editor, let's see what kind of options I have. So this is mainly built off of curvature, and it has a few textures applied over it as well. I think this mask is overly complex for this small part, though. So instead, I'm going to use my own. I'm going to build up. I generator, so I'll add a curvature map. And let's see the mask you. And I'll get rid of all these big ones because it is very tiny details. So it's only small stuff that will show up here. And I want to be in the mosque so I can see what I'm doing. Okay, so something like that, I think. And then I'll add a fill, and I'll put some sort of grunge in here. I'm looking for something that will fit with rubbery material. I think this one might work, and I'll scale this up or tie it a bunch. I'll set it to, let's see, multiply maybe I'll play with the balance so that more of the underlying curvature is poking through. I think that works quite well. Let's take a look. So I'm going to have this affect a little bit of color and a little bit of roughness. Maybe a tiny bit of height. So for color, I'll just set this to screen and I'll give it a very low value. You can see that screen puts through a little bit more of the actual color value from the underlying layer. So I think that's working. And then for roughness, I'll have a lower roughness value comped to everything else. And for height, I'll have it go down a tiny bit. Maybe a little bit more than that. A bit more than that. It's probably not doing anything, but I know it's there, so okay. I'll leave this label at that. Like I said, first pass, so I'm just getting in all of the main materials and not getting them to a finished extent yet. I want to fix up the zippers before I move on. So that's what I'm going to do next. But I'm looking at the time, and it says that it's time to end this episode. So I'll have to leave that for the next chapter. Thanks for watching this one, and I'll see you in the next one. 78. 10 Body Material Creation Part05: Hi, and welcome to Chapter ten of texturing. So in this one, there's one last thing I want to clean up with the pants before I move on, and that is this zipper. So I'm going to mask out some of this fabric material because I want to insert a different material into where this zipper goes. So let me go ahead and find the mask for the base material. And I'll add another paint layer. I'm just keeping all of these paint layers separate so that I can sort of adjust each of them if I find something that needs fixing later on. So I don't want to mix all of them up. And I'm just going to start painting around the edges here because I want to insert a different type of material around the zipper because that's what you usually have. You have a stronger material around the sides of the zipper. So I'm going to go ahead and quickly paint around that. This is actually probably something easier to do in the two D view. So I'm going to expand my two D view and sent it to the UV alignment. And I'm going to get to work with painting this. I've masked those areas out. I can add my layers back here, make them visible again. Now what I'm going to do is go ahead and copy this layer I just made or this effect, it's called. I'll go ahead and use that to make a new layer in this pants folder. I'll call this zippers. And I'll add fill layer in here and I'll add a black mask. I'll change the color of the fill layer to something easily distinguishable. And I'm going to paste the effect that I copied into here. And, of course, I need to go ahead and invert this basically. So if I take a look at the mask now, it's pretty much completely black. So I need to go ahead and add filter and just type invert. Hm. That's a little bit strange. So it seems like I'm not quite getting something right. So let me try this again. I'm going to copy this effect. Maybe I copied the wrong one or something like that, and I'm going to paste the effect. Yeah, that's a little bit unusual. Let me check what's going on here. So instead of starting from black, I'm going to start from white and then paste my effect in. So if I take a look at the mask now, now it's pasting more correctly, so this is what I had painted there. And now I can add the filter and invert this. So this is closer to what I want. Now we'll go back to the material view. And because the actual zippers are masked out for this entire folder, I don't have to worry about them. So this is pretty much looking correct to me. So I don't really have to do anything more for this aside from find a nice material to plug into this slot. So like I said, usually around zippers, there is some sort of strong material. Usually, it's some sort of Nylon weave. So I'm going to try and find something that can work with that. So I think I'm going to try using this Nylon webbing. I'm not sure if it's going to be what I want it to be, but just judging from this pattern, it seems to be pretty consistent to what I've seen around zippers. So if you check some reference material, it's kind of similar to the sort of thicker Nylon fabric you'll find around zippers, and I can always tweak it a little bit to make it look more like what it's meant to be. So I'll just import this to my assets. And let's see where it went. Here we go. I'll just replace this plastic cables material. And now, I'll dial it into what it's meant to be. So first off, the scale is definitely wrong here. So I'm going to tile this maybe 12 times. I can't really see what's going on here. That means that the height map is way too intense here. I'm going to lower the height range. If I check for height channel now, let's see there it is. You can see that there is actually height information in this material. So the other materials that I did before, they had all of their height data stored in the normal channel. This one has it in the height channel, so that's really good. Maybe it's a little bit easier to see on this side. So yeah, I don't even have a normal channel applied here. Everything's in the height, so that's great. So height range is what you want to adjust the most. That is, you know, how high up the highest peak is and how low down the lowest value is. So maybe something like this. Let me check the base color. So the base color is completely flat. Okay. I need to play with the scale until it's something reasonable. So maybe something like this. Yeah, I think that's working quite well. Looks like eight was working a little bit better than seven. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. Now, I'll change this color to black because that's usually what you have around zippers or at least very dark gray. Maybe not this dark. I don't want it to stand out too much, just a little bit. But the theme on this character is sort of black and gold in a lot of areas. So if I have the zippers the gold, as you can see they are here, then I probably want something quite dark around it. So actually, yeah, I'll go with this. And you can see that it's let me pixelated around the edges here. When I've got this sort of high frequency, very precise detail around these zips, I need to make sure that I sort of blur this mask out a little bit. I'm going to add a filter and add a blur. Okay. Let me take a look at the mask. This is too much. Okay, I'm realizing what's going on here. It's not this material that's getting I need to adjust the mask in this layer, not that one. I can go ahead and get rid of the blur here and let's see. I don't really want to add one. And have it propagate across entire metal. So you know what? I'll do is I'm going to add the zippers to this color selection, so they're included. But then I'll have to mask them out. Okay. Let me think about this for a moment. Yeah, I'm going to add the zippers to this mask. So let's take a look at the mask and I'll increase the tolerance a little bit so that I don't have that jagged edge around everything. Or maybe I'll just paint over. We have a white value. That'll be easier than going around and masking stuff and figuring things out that way. Okay. So now I can go back to this layer. And I can add a color selection on top of this and I'm going to pick this color and I'm going to set the mode to subtract subtracting out these zips. I can lower the hardness value a little bit here. That's not helping too much. Instead of lowering the hardness value, what I'll do is I'll add the blur here now again and I'll lower the intensity again I think something like this is working maybe a little bit less. I'll do 0.06. This is softened out a little bit. Then I'll see what I need to do on top of this actually. Blur usually makes your mask smaller because it expands out. What you have to do is then add levels on top to make your mask bigger again. So I think this will help. Hopefully, I'm not sure, but I'll see. Maybe I don't want to do this too much. Okay. I'll figure this out. Wants to add the actual metal zips. Yeah, I'll do this because I can overwrite this with the high map. I just basically want this to bleed in a little bit to the actual metal zip part so that there's no seam between the two areas. Okay, so on to dialing in this actual material. The outer ridge is kind of blurry now, so I don't really like that. Actually, no, not too bad. Yeah, I think that looks reasonable. So if I check the base color, it's a completely flat color. So I'm going to add an anchor point, and I'm going to add another fill layer on top of this. I'm going to add a black mask, and I'll add a fill. And in that fill, I will reference the anchor point. So it was layer 18. You should probably name these layers and anchor points, but I'm feeling I'm trying to get through this quickly for you so I'm not going to go through and name everything. I'm going to select the height channel now. If I take a look at the mask now, where is it there? You can see very faintly the height map. I can increase the intensity of this, it's more visible. And I can adjust this material so this doesn't stand out too much. Maybe lower the opacity a little bit, set it to screen and lower the opacity, and I'll check what the base color looks like, and I'll darken this color down a bit. Something like this, you can see, there is color variation in there now. So that's probably a little bit better. I will lower the height range a little bit more to 0.07. And I'll see if lowering the height position will help. Lowering the height position lowers the entire position of the height in that area. So if I lower it, you'll see that it's really digging into the surface of the mesh, at least in the sense that the normals are digging in. It's not actually changing the surface height, of course. So if I do something like 0.45, that's a little bit too much, maybe I'll do 0.49. And yeah, maybe that helps. I'll go ahead and paint this detail out now. There we go. Okay, so that's the base of the zip in. Now I'll add the part that goes on top of the zip. So it's masked out in this folder, so I'm just going to add a new folder for it. And I'll put a layer in here. And I'll just use the gold base material and work from there. So I'll add a black mask and a color selection, and I'll color select this. So now it's sort of sticking out too much, and it's got the height information from the underlying layer sort of poking in there. So what I'll do is I'll go to the height mode here, and I'll set this to replace or maybe just normal. So let me check the normal plus i plus mesh channel. Let's see. It's definitely not replacing stuff yet. Let me set this to normal as well. Okay, so the reason why nothing was changing when I was changing the blending mode of the height was because I didn't have a height channel in this material, so I just need to add a height channel to this material. And now, if I check the normal plus height plus mesh, if I hide unhide the height material, you can see that it's, you know, changing those normals. So you need to make sure that you have a height channel when you do this. So, you know, you need to make sure that you're not zoomed in too much when you're looking at this stuff because if I zoom in way close, I can see the pixelation here. But if I zoom out a little bit, this looks a lot more reasonable and a lot better. So looking at this, I know I need to lower the roughness quite a bit, that's too shiny, especially for a zipper. So something like this is a little bit more reasonable. Now, the height, maybe if I increase it, this will look a little bit better. So I'm going to try increasing the height by 0.1. 0.1 is way too much, so I'll lower this. I think that's helping a little bit. And there's not too much more you can do on a little detail like this, but I will add a little bit of roughness variation to this. I'll add a fill there, and I'll add a generator to this. But I need to put it in a black mask. And I'll do a let's see, I'll try metal edgeware, but on objects this tiny, it tends to not do a great job. So I'll lower the weal up down quite a bit and lower the wear contrast. I don't think that's doing too much. So instead of metal edgeware, maybe I'll try something else. So I'll just try the mask editor. And that'll give me a lot of options to play with. So let's try the curvature. If I set all of these to zero aside from the very sharpest one, I want to see what kind of result I can. Let me take a look at the mask. Okay, that's not particularly useful to me. There are different modes of the curvature generator. So there's edges, and then there's cavities, which is basically the opposite of edges, and then there's dual, which sort of does the boundary between both. And if I invert this, maybe this is what I want, but not really. So I'll just set this to edges. Now, what I can use instead of the curvature is one of the other maps that I baked from this. So if I go to my project maps and to the textures and I go down to the cloth, I made a convex and a concave bake, I believe. So let's try this convex map and replace the curvature with. Let me try some of these different modes. That's not too much better. Maybe instead of convex, I can try cavity and see what that does. This also doesn't seem all that useful. Probably going to have to leave that idea because it doesn't seem all that great. Like I said, this is too small a detail for the generators to really work effectively on it. So instead of this, I will just add maybe fill or Let me try one of these smart masks. Maybe there's something that works here. Something like Edges Uber. Let me see how this looks. That's way too intense right now. I can turn it down a little bit, though. For the curvature, if I just get rid of soft and fine and lower the edge as well. That's adding a little bit of surface radiation. That's nice. Maybe if I increase the frequency of this texture. I up the scale in the texture drop down, that's also a little bit more useful. And let's see I can play with a contrast slider, maybe lower the global balance a bit. Let me take a look at this material. So let's see what this layer is doing, if anything. It's doing a little bit, but not too much. So what I wanted to do is do a lot of roughness work. So let me alt click on the roughness. And I'll have this be a lower roughness value than everything else. So a tiny bit of variation, and maybe in color, metal doesn't usually vary along its surface very much, but, you know, this will add just a tiny bit of variation along itself. And maybe I'll add, let's see, a little bit of ambient occlusion to this generator as well and see what that does. Probably not. Probably best to leave that for another layer. You know what I will do is I'll add very small speckling of color over this again. So sometimes, I'm just adding stacking on, you know, a few layers of colors that, you know, I'm not 100% sure will do anything, but sometimes it's just good to experiment and play around with these things. So trying to add that coverage to a player and that kind of stuff. I was just trying to see if that would work and it did. So Yeah. Let's see. I'm going to add a fill here. And now that I added that color, I'm actually liking this more dark orange color. And I actually see that that's kind of what it looks like in the concept, as well. So maybe I'll darken the entire gold color down a bit to that value. Something like this. Okay. Now for this fill layer, because this is a very small object, I don't really have to worry about layering this too much. So I'll add this dirt three, and let's take a look at the mask now. I'll increase the scale of this to something like that and then increase the contrast as well and the balance. And let's see if this is producing a noticeable effect. Not really. Well, a little bit. If I take a look at the base color. It is doing something there, so I'll keep it, and I'll add a roughnest in there as well. So yeah, sometimes not every single one of these things does something, but still, you know, stack some stuff up. And from a distance, I don't know, I don't think I'm going to zoom in any closer than here. This probably looks fine. I'm going to add an ambient occlusion on top of this, though. And I'll add a fill. Not a fill, a generator. I'll make this an ambien occlusion generator. Now, again, you can use the mask generator node if you want to have several of these things in one effect layer. So, this one, I mean, Hang on. Got a filter generator. So you can use this mask editor generator instead of the singular curvature and ambient occlusion ones, but I find that sometimes it's easier to just handle these things one by one instead of using the generator for the whole thing. Okay, so let me see what this mask is doing. Right. So maybe instead of ambient occlusion, I want to try the cavity map, but I baked out. So you can always just swap these out in the generator for anything you might need. And yeah, the cavity is probably more along the lines of what I need. So I'm going to invert the cavity. And I'll set the metalness of this cavity down to zero. Is there something that's too shiny here? I'm not sure. And the roughness down. So you can see this cavity, the sambient occlusion is adding around these. So it is really helpful. Helping to break these teeth up, right? That's definitely helping. Okay. And for these ends, I may want to make these plastic, but I'll leave them as is for now. I'll add a paint on top of this so I can paint this in. And the hard work, adding the speckling and stuff paid off because the tops of these zippers look pretty good without having to add any more tweaks to them. I'll probably just paint this in the two devie and it'll be easier. Okay. And let me find the end of the zipper. Here they are. Okay, all done with that. Now, let me that's not very good. I should have been in UV alignment. There you go. So you can see the issues that can arise from not painting in the correct alignment mode. But that's fixed now. So I think that's all for the pants. Now I can move on to probably this square of fabric. So that's what I'm going to do next. So for this square fabric, I'm going to be showing you how to make an entire material out of just a temp, I think, because right now I've been pretty much just dragon dropping substance three D materials and then tweaking them. So I've been using the roughness channels and the base color channels. And, you know, a lot of the time, I will just use a temp to generate the entire material and sort of extrapolate a color and the roughness or from just a temp or an ambient occlusion. Usually, you can use a temp as an ambient occlusion. So I'm going to show you how to do that. So I've picked this synthetic twill fabric for this and hopefully it'll work well enough for what I'm going for. So I'm going to drag this into the material slot. Like I said, I'm only going to be using the height in this case. I'll alt click on height. I'm only using the height map here and I'm going to build everything out from this. I need to add an anchor point here so that I can pull from that height map into all of the other areas, and I need to dial in how sort of height range I'm using here. I'm going to lower this 0.03. And I kind of want a harder material around the outside, and then for the inside, I will fill in something soft. But right now, I'll just leave this single material across the whole surface of fabric. Now, there is a little bit of a seam here because the angles of these two UV islands are slightly different. And also, it's projecting across two UV islands, but the belt goes across this and should hide that seam well enough. So I'm not going to worry about that. I'll add a new layer, and I'll use this for color and roughness. So for the base color, let me color pick something from a concept. So I'm going to have a darker base color below everything and sort of base roughness here. I can put this into this channel as well if I wanted to. But like I said, I don't want to confuse you guys, and I'm just going to be using the height map here. You can see I've only got the height layer here and I'm going to be pulling everything from it. I'll darken this slightly because this is going to be the base layer and then I'll be lightening from it. Make this a little bit darker and I've set the roughness quite high because I'm going to make the layer on top of it lighter. So I don't need to add any mask in this layer because this is just a sort of base coat. But for this one, I'll add a black mask and a fill, and I'll pick the anchor point for this. So that will be layer six. And I'm going to color pick my color again this time a lighter one. Let me take a look at the mask because right now, nothing's showing up. I need to add a levels here. Actually, no, I need to go to this fill and set it to the temp channel. And there's a level adjuster here right here in the anchor points, just click Auto to clamp this to either side of the levels. And let's take a look at the material. So yeah, I have a little bit of height here. If I add another levels on top of this, you can see that it's going to be easier to slide stuff around now because I'm sort of instead of having to tweak these very tiny values, it's sort of expanded everything out to this much, so it's going to be easier to adjust things. So let's see what the material looks like. So, you know, the color variation and everything is here. You know, it's quite similar to the default material now. I'm going to lower the roughness down a little bit. I don't want this to be a very shiny fabric. And let's see. I guess the color is working quite well. I'm going to add another layer for variation. And actually, for this one, let's see. I'll have color, roughness and ambient occlusion. Never mind that. I don't want ambient occlusion in here. Or I can have it. No, it's probably best not to put ambien occlusion in your actual flat textures. Okay, so let's see how this looks. I'll just start adding the sort of variation layers. So from here on, it's pretty much like what I was doing before. Now, you may want to have, you know, a separate layer for roughness and color. In this case, I think it's okay. Let me rename this folder to edge. And I will paint out everything from the inside. So I'll add another paint. And I'll paint in black, and I'll paint out the insides of this because I want to have a slightly different material between the sort of edges and the inside. Okay, so that's done. I'm going to slightly adjust the colours here because I don't think they're exactly what I wanted. So I'm gonna go for something a little bit more beige, and I'll darken things down a little bit as well. Okay. Okay, so I'll add another fill layer. Hang on. I think I already did that. Yep, I did. So once more, this is going to be one of those sort of color variation textures. So I'm just going to add a dirt here. So I need to add a fill layer, actually. I'll set the channel blending mode to screen and lower the intensity a lot. Or maybe instead of screen, I can do something like overlay or I'll do screen. And maybe in the base colour, I'll add some sort of grunge. Maybe the same one I already used, so that kind of rust texture should work fine. It's even, like, a similar color to the thing I'm making here. Maybe multiply will work better. Or linear dodge. So I'll up the scale a little bit, but not too much yet. Actually, I'm in the color layer. I need to do this in over here. Okay, so that's adding a little bit of variation. It's also affecting the roughness too much. So I'm going to go to the roughness channel, and I'll just make this very, very light. These two channels are the only ones I want color and roughness. In terms of the color, I think it's doing okay for now. I'll just add another fill for some very fine breakup. I think I'll set this one to lighten. Let's see which texture works here. I'm looking for something with a lot of contrast in it and something fairly even. This one will probably work fine. So let me take a look at my mask right now. Up the scale of this a lot. Maybe ten is the wrong one, maybe multiply or, I think linear dodger is working quite and I'm going to increase the contrast a bit more to something like this. Now, let's take a look at the material. Okay. So this looks pretty good, but, of course, the intensity is just too high right now. I want this to be very subtle. Let's see if this is too subtle. Put this to 20. Okay. That'll do for now. So, let's see. I guess I should fill in this big square next. So now I'm going to set up a folder for the inside of this mask. So I'm going to add a folder. And I'll add a layer to it, and I'll make it bright red. And I'll add a black mask to the layer. And let's see, I'll copy this effect and paste it into a black mask. Then I'll set the blending mode to subtract. That hasn't done it. I'll set this to normal and I'll add I'll add a fill underneath. I want the fills value to be black and then I can set this on to subtract and now it will work maybe. No. Okay. I'll set the fills value to white, and then I will invert this whole layer. I'll add a filter, Invert. This is looking good, so I don't really need to make much adjustment if I do, then I'll do that later. And now for this material, I've picked out a synthetic satin or rather a synthetic swede. Now, I don't really like using materials like this a lot of the time, stuff like, um, you know, what's it called felt and stuff like this, stuff that's kind of like fluffy on the surface because it's kind of hard to get those to work in real time. You're basically relying on the normal map to provide a sense of fluffiness, and then, you know, you can try and add some fronel effect to sort of help that fluffiness, but it's not always convincing. In this case, I think it'll work, but it's something to be aware of, those kinds of fluffy materials with no sort of weave on them. They can be hard to get to read properly when you're working on a real time asset. I'm just going to drag this on to replace material mode. And I'll scale it up. Something like seven. I think at seven, it's working quite well. Now I'll set the color to something like the concept. And I think that was pretty good. It's a little bit closer to the color of the pants, so maybe I'll color pick from over here instead. Yeah, I think that's good. Now I need to decide if I want to make this slightly darker or lighter than the edge. So let's see. Because I do want it to sort of, you know, not be the exact same color because that's a little bit jarring. So I think I'll go with something just barely lighter. And now I'll add a lot of breakup in the height. Not really breakup, but just add additional height detail, like I did with the pants. So one of these cloth fold textures that I've imported. I have to check if this is the tiling version. This one's the tiling version. Okay. And I'll just add a little bit of height to this. And let me check out the mask, see how that looks. So I need to up the tiling a little bit. And I'm going to rotate this to follow the direction of the piece of cloth. So I'm going to play with the levels a bit. I'm going to increase C D value. It's still not too visible, so I'll increase just the overall height that's being added. And maybe this materials is a little bit sharp because fluffy things don't have sharp edges to them usually when they crease. I'm going to replace this with a softer one like this one maybe. Although I wouldn't say this one's all that soft. Let me take a look at the mask. It's pretty harsh. Let's see. What about this one. They're all pretty harsh. Um, I think this one's pretty soft. I'm going to increase the intensity a little bit more and I will blur out the mask a little bit. I'm going to add a blur filter. That's because I want to make this look more soft. If I take a look at the mask and I'll lower this down so that it's just a little bit softer. Because right there you can see that this is a more linen or crisp type of cloth, and if I add the blur, it's a little bit more rounded, so that should help. It is adding that detail, but it's a little bit softer. And I'll add a little bit of color to this to get it to show up a tiny bit better. I'll set the color blending mode, the screen, and I'll lower the opacity a lot. Maybe I'll make this kind of warm tone as well. So that'll make it look a little bit softer as well. That looks quite intense, though, now that I rotate the light around, so I'm going to lower this height intensity to 0.2. Okay, I think that's pretty good. Now I'll add that color variation that I always add. So at that point, you could probably, you know, start copy pasting this layer because it's very similar every time. But yeah, I'm just going to make it from scratch again because it doesn't take that long. So I'll add a fill and I'll find a nice sort of dotted texture. Now we felt like this, it's really, you know, little dots just everywhere. I think dirt four will work nicely in this case. I'll up the scale and increase the contrast and lower the opacity. And I'll get rid of the other channels. I'll just have height and rough and I'll make the rough really rough. And again, I will make this kind of a yellowish. So let me take a look at this mask. Let me see the mask again. I'll add another fill and I want this to be even higher frequency. So Dirt three is the really high frequency tiny one. It's just tiny little dots, and I'll increase the balance and the contrast. So it basically looks like TV static because that's what you get with these materials. But and now I'll blend these together. So I'll set this to not multiply but to linear dodge. Okay. So that's adding a lot of color breakup. Now, maybe there is too much warm color here. I'll change this to something like that, and I'll lower the opacity a lot and I'll also set this to, let's see. Just a screen. I think I want to increase the contrast on the mask even more, so let me take a look at the mask. Right now it's pretty blurry, so I'll add a filter. And I think there is a contrast filter, and I can just increase the contrast. Okay, so something like that as a starting point works quite well. I think I'm going to end this chapter here, but just because I'm running out of time now, and I'll continue this in the next one. 79. 11 Body Material Creation Part06: Hello, and welcome to Chapter 11 of texturing. Moving on to the top part of the torso now, I'm going to be doing the sort of chest piece here. And for this, I've picked out this wool load in material. Here's what it looks like on substance source so you can find it. But, you know, I would suggest looking around and picking your own choices for this. It's not usually important what you pick. Just vary things up for every different material. So I'll just apply this to this material node or mode. And these come with opacity turned on by default. That's why you can see these pixels through it here. I definitely don't want opacity. That's for maybe a very high end, pre rendered or, you know, not real time rendered object that can use that sort of opacity. In real time rendered, opacity isn't good enough for that kind of stuff, and I don't need it either. I'm going to have a height map and I'm going to get rid of the normal map because I don't really need it. I don't really need the metal on the ciber. And I'll go down to technical parameters and lower the height range if something more appropriate. Something very subtle. Like 0.02, or maybe even 0.03. Okay. I think that is working. Now I'll set the color to something that looks like the concept. Okay, so something like this, slightly lower the saturation and just barely lighten it, I think. Well, maybe that dark is working quite well. Maybe I'll shift this more towards blue. Yeah, something like this. So there's a few details that go onto this material. Firstly, this sort of thing. So I'll just paint that using a mask. I've thus, so I'm going to paint this on, and then I will be able to take a screenshot of this in the two deve and use that to paint out my proper stencil, because it's gonna be hard to sort of plan this out without having a sort of template to work on, so Let's see what I can do here. Let me pick a more reasonable brush. And get rid of this alpha. There's a little line that goes next to this thing. There's something like that maybe and then there's some writing here. And three arrows. The arrows go lower down. It's not super important to get this 100% precise. But it's good to have a good template. Now this is something like that, and then it has an angle that goes down here. I think the angle should come down a bit lower. So there's a template. Let's see. Maybe I should make it a little bit wider. Maybe I'll have it extend out this much. And I'll have the lettering in here. So I'll just do some squibbles there for now. And the arrows go like this. Okay, so that's how it looks slightly bigger. How does that work? Yeah, I think that's pretty good. So I'll go with that. So now to take a screenshot of the two D view. So I'll just use this and take the screenshot. And I'm going to copy paste this into Photoshop. Okay, so here it is pasted into Photoshop. I'm going to go ahead and start outlining this a little bit. Or actually I'll use the shape tools here since this is kind of a pretty straightforward shape. So Oops. And I'll just duplicate this one around. And move it. Okay, and I'll do it again. And this one I will use Control T to manipulate into shape that I need. I just need to move this down a bit, it lines up with that. I'll just extend this one down. Let's see those arrows. You can probably make those with line tool. Thanks. Make a new layer for these. Oh, I want to make a path, that'll let me no, that's not what I wanted. What I want is actually, what I can use for this is I can just make a rectangle. So I'll make this a square and have no fill, but have a wide edge, maybe 25250 is too much. Okay, so 50. Um probably 35 maybe. Yeah, 35 will work. Actually, no. I'll put that up to 40. And I'm going to convert this to I'll rasterize that layer. And now I can use just select to let those sides and I can just move this into position. That wasn't a uniform scale. Let's do that over again. Okay, so let me hide the underlying original textures. Let's see how I can clean this up. I'll join all of these together now. And maybe clean some stuff up. I want to remove the bottom of this. I'm just going to erase away this corner like it is in the concept. I'll round off these corners as well just by hand. Because they're quite small, it doesn't need to be super precise. Okay. I undid too much, so I'm just having to redo this slightly. I think I'll do that trick actually with the fur the levels that seems to have cleaned up stuff quite nicely. I'm going to add another layer for this writing. Now I have no idea what this says, so I'll just do some random Scifi shapes anyway. I can't remember a shortcut for rotating the view. So I'll make it a little bit easier to do that writing. It starts about halfway up, if I check this, something like that. I'll make the levels. I won't do that. I'll just start with something like this, maybe. The undo key seems a little bit unresponsive for me right now. I've just realized I can actually make out that this is sport, I think. So I don't have to come up with any nonsense after all. I can just use a text tool and find a cool font. So that's what I'm going to go ahead and do. I'm going to increase the scale up to 60. Even more. 150 250. Okay, that's getting somewhere. And let's see some cooler more Sci Fi fonts, huh? This is a little bit thick. I definitely don't want serifs and stuff. Something simple like that could work. All this. What else do I have here? I think this one might be a good one. These are all the English ones. Let's see. Have a browse through again. Yeah, I think I'm going to go with that one. Definitely seems to fit in here. I want to scale this up a little bit more. Okay. I can go ahead and save this out. And I can go back into Substance Painter now. So I just need to find the texture and drag it in. And I'll put this to the project, and I'll make sure it's a texture or rather an Alpha. And I'll put this into the projector and I'll add a new paint layer, and I'll just fade the old one out. And I'll keep it there just so I can sort of tell where I'm supposed to place this. So I think right here might be good. And let me take a look at the three D view. Yeah, I think that's working quite well. I'm not convinced with the arrows on top here though. Maybe I should line some of these elements up a little bit better. I'm going to go ahead and try and do that in Photoshop. I've redone the arrows or the Chevrons and I've lined them up with this angle here, and hopefully that'll look a little bit better. I'm going to reimport this alpha and go into the stencil mode again and update it. So you need to sort of clear the gray scale map that's already in there and drag it back in if you want stuff to update. In substance painter, I found a lot of the time. Dragging it in over again doesn't always work. It's a little bit annoying, but, you know, So let's see how this looks in the three D view. I think that's probably going to work for me. So in terms of material, what do I want here? Firstly, I want color, and then I want some height. So for the height, I'll raise it up a bit, and I'll also set the height blending mode to normal. And I reduce the opacity a tiny bit just so a little bit of the underlying cloth texture comes through. I'll lower this height down a lot. I want this to be a very thinly painted graphic pattern on the cloth. I don't want this to be standing out too much. Now for the roughness, I want a light roughness value. Let me increase the opacity with cloth. I also want a metallic here, actually. Since I already need a metallic channel in this map anyway because of the zippus, I might as well take advantage of it and have this sort of a semi metallic paint. So if I set this to, let's see half, I think that looks pretty cool. I'll lower the brightness of it. I think that looks pretty good. Yeah. Let me see the mask now. Okay. So I'm going to go with that for this for now. I may want to. I had a little bit of roughness breakup here. But I think I'll do that when I do my final polish pass. I'll leave this as it is for now. So I'll move on to the red section of the best. Let me get a normal brush back cause I need to clean up this mask a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Uh Okay, so that sat mask more or less cleaned up. Now, let's see what I'm going to do for this sort of material. I probably want something kind of industrial looking here. So let me see if I can find something like that. So I think what I'm going to do is try building up this material from scratch instead of just picking something from substance three D. There's nothing wrong with picking materials as a base starting point from substance three D. But another good thing to know is how to build stuff up from a series of very simple masks just in substance painter. So when I'm working this way, typically, I will start from the height channel. Or, you know, just build up a height map and then build around that. So I'm going to add a black mask here and add a fill to that black mask. And I'm going to use the tile generator to generate this sort of pattern of perforated holes through this entire material. That's the sort of idea I have for this one. So let me go to the mask view. And here you can see how the tile generator looks by default. Now, for the pattern, I probably want something else. So disc is going to make a lot of round circles, but they have a harsh edge. So that's not going to look very good with a height map. Paraboloid sort of has a gradient around the edge. And there's a few different kinds of these gradients you can have. In this case, I found that Gaussian worked quite well to produce a sort of like little sharp hole. Now the next thing I want to do is increase the tiling. And let me just check. I need to lower the height value a little bit to get this to show up. Okay, so you can see that these sort of gaussian holes are working quite well. The bell is a little bit too spread out, and the form it works well at this scale, but once you scale it down a little bit more, it starts to not work as well. So that's what I'm going to go. Yeah, so going to go over back to the Gaussian, and I need to scale this up a little bit more. 16 isn't quite cutting it, so I'm going to try 48. And that seems to be about the size I want for these. Maybe I'll put it up to 52. So something like that. And so a little bit intense in terms of height right now. So I'll just lower this value down to let's see, 0.05 or 0.04. Okay. Now, the next thing I want to do in terms of the height channel is mask out the grooves because they don't look very good when you have pattern going inside of them. The other thing I might want to do is just rotate everything by 45 degrees. Like I said, I prefer that to a grid pattern. So I'm going to go over to rotation. And type in 45. And that's giving me a little bit more of a diamond pattern. And, you know, that works better, especially when I have these sort of stripes that go along. It's preventing, you know, dots lining up with the edge of the stripes. So 45 seems to be working a lot better. So there's the base of my height map. I'm trying to go for some sort of sort of harder flicker industrial looking sort of covering material here. So that's okay for a base, but I still want to mask out the little gaps in here because I don't want the height map to be showing up in there. So I'm going to add a a curvature generator. So I'll add a generator, and I'll add curvature. Now, like I've said before, you can use the mask builder. The reason why I don't really like the mask builder all that much is because firstly, scrolling through that entire list is a little bit annoying. Let me just show you. So scrolling through this whole list is a little bit annoying, and it doesn't give you as much control in terms of the order you want to blend these things in. So I prefer to use the generators that are just separate and are just one function at a time and then stack those up in the stack. And that gives me a little bit more freedom to move stuff around, and it's a little bit easier to find everything you want in there. So I'm going to use the curvature generator. I'm going to take a look at my mask and I'll set this to multiply. I just want to mask out the gaps. Actually, I'm going to set this back to normal just so I can see what I'm working with. I don't want to mask these areas where stuff blends out a little bit more, so I'm going to try and lower the larger values. It's only capturing the very cavity. In fact, what I can do is set this to cavities and then invert it. There's several different modes you can work with. Cavities basically does the opposite of um of edges. And then there's dual mode that does both cavities and edges. That one's a little bit weird, but there are some use cases for it. So remember that there are a few different options for this. So this is getting close to what I want. And if I increase the balance at Okay, let me see how this looks if I multiply it over. I'm not liking that these are still here, but there doesn't seem to be a real way around it, unless maybe you can get one of these larger values and they will, but it doesn't seem to really work. So yeah, I'm just going to have to try this and see how it works. So I don't really have any more dots within the gap, as you can see, it's definitely helping in that respect. So I think this will work fine. But another thing you can try if you can't get the results you really want is there's a reason why I baked out those extra cavity maps. And that's for, you know, cases where the Cleta map isn't really doing the job you want it to do. So where is the cavity map for the body? I can't seem to find it. There it is. So you can just replace any of these in the generator, and it'll just be fine. So if I take a look at the mask now, and I set this back to normal so I can see what I'm doing. The only issue with the cavity map is it's a little bit pixelated around the edges. It's a bit harsh. Um, so that's something to look out for. But if you up the balance, that's sort of cleaning things up. And if I add a little bit of blur, that should help. So I set this to 0.1, and I add some more of the fine detail. I think that'll do. 0.2 maybe. Let me see how this looks. Okay. Yeah, that's giving me the result I want. That's more or less the height map part done. Now I can add an anchor point here. So best red height or maybe base will work better. Now I'll be able to reference this height map from any other layer I add on top here. So actually, what I'll do is below all of this, I will add a base layer for the color. Let me just color a bit from the concept. Maybe brighten this up a little bit. So I'll have a base color and a base roughness. So I do want this to be a little bit shiny, something like that works well, and I'll add a roughness channel to this one as well because I want the little holes to be less rough or more rough than everything else. So if I check the roughness map, now they're sort of masked. Okay, so it's gradually getting built up. Now I'll add I can also add a color channel to this and set this to be a sort of darker color in the pores or the little perforations. I'm going to sort of shift this a little bit to a purple. Maybe that'll look nice and add a little bit of color variation. So if I check the base color now, it's got a little bit of darkness in those holes. It's making them pop a little bit more. Maybe I will set this to multiply, and I'll lower the value a little bit. Okay. And now I'm going to add another layer. I want a little bit of ambient occlusion in these gaps and not really ambient eclusion but a little bit of a darker color in the gaps. So because I already have an ambient occlusion, pake out for this area, but I want to add a little bit of the darker color value in there as well. So I'll add a curvature generator. And let me go into the mask view, although this view is sort of working fine as well. So let me adjust this. I want to set this to cavities. And I want this to be quite blurred out. I don't want this to be this sharp, so maybe I'll lower the sharpest value. Now, cavities is sort of inverted from edges, so increasing the values will actually make stuff. Increasing the values will mask stuff out more than it masks stuff in. So you see when I increase those values, stuff gets masked out because cavities are sort of inverted from edges. I luring a lot of these because I want this to be, you know, quite blurred out. I don't want this just to be the harsh cavities. Something like this, and I'll add a little bit of blur on top, something like that. And I can change the color and also add a roughness to this I want this to be a little bit more rough than everything else and, you know, kind of darker color. So I'll color pick from here and I'll lower value as well. And maybe I'll make it a little bit more towards purple. And I'll change the blending mode to, let's see, overlay seems to be working. I'll add a little bit more color to this in that case. Okay, so you can see that's adding that sort of detail there. But I should also add a little bit of breakup because that looks very smooth. So I can just put a fill on top of this. Let me check the mask. And I'll drag some sort of grunge into that fill. So let's see these pebbles will probably work. If I just tile this up a bunch maybe to something like 32. And I set the blending mode to let's see what multiply does. Yeah, multiply seems to be working. So let's see how that looks. Okay. Now it's making everything really subtle. So I just lowered the opacity of this and I increase the overlay, and I'm going to increase the contrast on my grunge. Oops, that was the wrong effect. Let's just check the mask again. Okay, so I'm going to increase the contrast here and shift balance a little. Maybe multiplayen't quite working. Let's see about darkening or maybe I want these edges to not be so smooth. So I'm going to play with blending modes a little bit. So I think overlay will sort of break up that edge a little bit, and that's exactly what I want. So let me see if I can scale this up more to have this to be a little bit more fine, something like that. So I take a look at this now. You know, it's a little bit more grainy around the edges, and that's what I was looking for. So I'll, lower the opacity of this and, something like that. Let me just check this mask again. Yeah, I think that's working quite well. In fact, I can increase this covet a little bit and add a bit more blood to help with that. So let me see how this looks. Yeah, I think that's kind of how I want it. Maybe I'm not super keen on this very dark spot, and that's just a result of, you know, the curvature being a lot darker in that area. And in cases like that, just, you know, paint those areas out if there's something that's, you know, a little bit too rough. So we get this watercolor brush, that'll probably work. And I'll just set this to a dark value. And I'll lower the flow a lot, so it's very subtle. And then we go dark spot sort of cleaned up. Okay, so there's a little bit more color variation and a little bit more roughness variation. Now, I probably want to add an overall bit of color variation to this. So like just some random noise to the color. So I'll do that, add another layer. I'll click to just have it focus on the color layer. And I'll try using this grunge to sort of add a little bit of color variation to this. So I'll set the blending mode to maybe something like overlay. And actually, what I meant to do was add a black mask to this and add a fill and put that grunge into the filth channel. Instead of into the base color and the base color, I will put something maybe kind of orangish, something like that. So let's just isolate the base color so I can see what I'm working with. Maybe I'll make this a bit more of a payable value. And I'll increase the tiling on this and the contrast and the balance. I don't think this texture is working too well. I want something that's a little bit more an even noise. It may be this. Something like that. Let me see how that looks across the material. So right now, it's very intense and also maybe I want to set this to something like linear Dodge, introduce a little bit more of that orange back. Like so and really lower down the opacity. Linear dodge is sort of washing things out, so I'm going to try some of these other blending modes. I think color dodge is pretty good usually. Yeah, so that's saturating stuff more, so I prefer that, and I'll lower this to maybe 20 or maybe I'll add a levels here. And if I take a look at this mask, right now, it's fairly even in distribution. So if I just sort of have a little bit more of higher peaks and everything else is a little bit more even, then I think that'll help slightly. Let's see. You see it's become a little bit less even now. So we go back to material. Okay. I do need to increase tiling on this though. And I'll lower the overall opacity. And I can put a little bit of roughness in here as well just to add a bit of variation. Okay. And one thing I did sort of think of is that maybe I want this to be kind of metallic, as well. That might look cool. So I'm going to try increasing the metallic value, and I think that actually looks pretty cool, right? It sort of helps it pop from the rest of the body and makes this part look a little bit more special. Like, why is this pad here? Well, if I make it metallic, too, then it looks like, even more important, like it has a reason to be there. So I think that metallic value is working quite well. Now, usually when you're working with metallic, you either want it to be set to one or to zero. But some materials like maybe some sort of sci fi fabric or stuff like silk and things like that, usually metallic value in the gray area works quite well. But most of the time, something is either not metallic at all or completely metallic, so keep that in mind. One thing I do want to do is add some pinkish highlights to all of this. So I'll add another layer and I'll add a generator. Oops, I need to add it to a mask. I'll add a generator, and I will make this another covered generator as usual. And let's see what I want to base it on. So I do want it to be on the edges. So I'm going to load these big ones and just have it quite subtle and just be on very peaks of these parts. Maybe if I up the contrast a little bit. Maybe something like that'll work. So if I just isolate this two color and color pick this pink shade, and I'm going to increase the saturation a little bit and the value. That's adding a little bit of a nice pink highlight to everything, I think. So I'll go with that. Maybe I'll make this a little bit more intense. Something like that. Okay, so this is working pretty well. Maybe I want some sort of, let's see, some sort of scratching or grunge on here, so I'll add a black mask again, and I'll add that curvature generator. But more importantly, on top of that, I want to add a fill, and there is a very nice scratches, procedural material or procedural texture in here, somewhere around here, this one. So there's the rough ones, and then there's a few other ones. I'm probably going to go with the rough ones. And this actually has a bunch of options to sort of customize this to exactly what you need. So I'm going to increase the tiling a bunch to get this down to the scale that I want, something like this. And then I'll lower the scratch nth let's see. I'll lower the amount of dust on here. I don't really want that dust. I do like these scratches. I don't like double scratches though. Let's see. Let me randomize the seed because I didn't quite like all of those scratches being bunched up there. I'm going to increase the length a little bit now. Maybe lower the tiing ever so slightly. So something like this, perhaps, I'll increase the width a little bit because a lot of these are just too thin to be seen. And now for this, I'll just have it affecting the color, the height very subtly and the rough the roughness I'll put down to nothing. Also maybe the metalness. So the height, I'll have a very small negative value. Let's make these pop out a little bit. And then the color, I want it similar to the base tone of this but slightly different. So maybe scratching, you know, reflective fabrics and stuff usually are prone to getting scratched and stuff, so I kind of want to reflect that a little bit. The sort of orangish tone will make it look like it's feeling through the surface a bit. Something like that, maybe. Okay. I think that's kind of working. Now I want to go back to that curvature, and I'll just make it mask off the gaps because it wouldn't be really normal for scratches to go into those little gaps. I would be kind of covered up. So I'll set this to multiply. Let me see what the mask is like now. Okay. Um Yeah, that's doing what I wanted to do. And let's see. The height seems to be a little bit too intense right now. And the color does as well, so I'll lower the color value. And I think that's enough. Okay. Yeah. So for now for this first pass, that's what I'm going to do for this sort of pad here. And I think I will want a little bit more grunge on here. Maybe I'll hand paint a little bit of stuff around the corners here or something like that. But for now, I'll leave it like this. And yeah, I think that looks pretty good for what it is right now. So that's going to be all for this chapter, and hopefully by the next one, the whole first pass on the body materials will be finished, and I can move on to a different part of the body. Thanks for watching. 80. 12 Body Material Creation Part07: Hello, and welcome to Chapter 12 of texturing. So in this chapter, I'm just going to be finishing up this vest and doing cape. So for the vest, I still need to add sort of curvature, a highlight layer that I usually add to cloth, and then maybe do a little bit of stitching and basically do the same for the vest. So I'm just going ahead and finding the vest folder in my layer stack here. And here's the folder. And I'm adding a paint layer to put the stitches into, and I'm just going to use the stitch brush that comes with substance painter. And I just need to dial in the correct value for the stitches. So slightly adjust the color and the scale. So I'm just going to pick a similar scale of stitches to the pants because usually, you know, stitching is more or less the same size, right? You don't have a wild and different style of stitching on every single different piece of clothing, unless, you know, it's a stylistic choice, I guess. But yeah, most of the time, stitches are just fairly plain and boring and sort of standard size. So I'm not going to try and make these look different in any way to what I did for the pants. I'm just going to make sure they somewhat match the color of the vest. So, you know, they still have to be a little bit different to the vest so that they're actually visible at all, but they should blend in from a distance and only really be visible as you zoom closer in because yeah, try not to make stitching too visible on your character because that can sort of make it look a little bit cartoonish. And if you're going for a more realistic look, then keep it subtle. On a stylized character, having stitches that are really bright and visible everywhere can start to look a little bit maybe cheesy, I would say. But, you know, that's up to personal choice, as well. In this case, yeah, I'm going for something kind of subtle, something that's more visible as you zoom in closer, and as you get further away, more or less blends into the rest of the cloth. So I'm just trying to make sure that the stitch width and length are exactly the way I want them to. So I'm just going by the reference I used for the pants here. Now, I'm pretty sure that brushes keep the same settings as you leave them. They don't reset or anything unless you press the reset button. So I probably could have kept the stichs the way they were, but maybe at the time, I didn't realize this, and I ended up messing up the settings, and now I'm just trying to redo them here. So I think I'm going to settle with something like that. It seems to look fine from a distance. So I'm just going to delete this paint layer and then add a new one. And the only reason I did that was so I wouldn't have to undo or erase any of those test strokes. So, you know, once the brush is set up, I can either erase everything or I can just delete the entire layer and make a new one. It makes no difference, right? Unless you've already done some stitching work in there, in that case, you definitely don't want to delete the layer. So here, I'm just going to go ahead and paint out all of these stitches. So this is pretty boring, just me following some lines. So what I'll do is fast forward through all of the stuff that's just me drawing the stitches to follow the seams around on the model. So when you're drawing stitches and stuff, like I said, when I was doing the pants, don't overdo it. Sort of pay attention to where stitches should be, because most of the time on cloves, you can't really see the stitching. It's hidden on the inside of the cloves. And top stitching appears in, you know, particular areas either just as decoration or, you know, where it can't be hidden when you're, you know, just joining two pieces of cloth on top of each other like there was on that first seam, but you can see that the second seam is sort of internal. And that bit around the edge, usually, yeah, edges on shirts and stuff have to be top stitched because there's no way to hide that seam. But when you're joining two parts of cloth together, usually that seam is on the inside, so pay attention to that. Um, you know, it's just like, if you have too much very visible stitching, I feel like it ends up looking, you know, cartoonish, and I might even say a little bit amateurish, because that's something I think beginners like to do a lot. They find the stitch brush, and they trace everything with it. But yeah, stitches don't go everywhere on the model. There are particular places, you know, take a look at your own clothes and see where the stitches are placed. So you may want to alternate between the two D view and a three D view when you're doing this, you know, whichever is easier for the particular part. So stuff is laid out more easily in the two D view, you know, especially if it's something hidden underneath another object or something that really curves around a lot, something like that. Other stuff is easier in the three D view. So I switch between the two. And yeah, like I said, make sure that your alignment mode is correct when you're doing that. So when you're in the three D view, set to tangent wrap and in the two D view, set it to U V, and, you know, that's pretty much all you need to know for that. Now back to real time here. I'm just going to add that curvature highlighting detail. So I've said before, it's not like 100% realistic. I just I feel adds a little bit of softness and a little bit of color variation. So I'm just adding a layer and adding a black mask and then putting a generator into it. And that's going to be the curvature generator. And I just need to dial in these values so that it's just really the peaks that are getting highlighted. I don't want this going across very large flat areas, really. I just want, you know, the very crests of folds and stuff. So something like this, of course, the effect needs to be a little bit more subtle than this. But yeah, aim for something like that, if you're going to be doing this. And the brightness, you know, I played around with a slider, but it's best to keep it at zero because, you know, it just clamps the brightest, you know, your lowest value to a certain brightness. So, you know, if you have it set to something above one, you won't have any blank values anymore, and that won't look very good. You'll have, you know, the entire texture will get washed out. I only want the very peaks of folds and curves to get washed out. So on top of that curvature, I'm going to add another layer just to break up the curvature, of course, the curvature map is perfectly smooth. So, you know, I don't want smooth shapes across this. I want a little bit of breakup to make stuff look a little bit more real and a little bit more alive. So yeah, these grunges and breakups are really common, and you're going to see a lot of these, especially when I get to refining these textures. A lot of that work is just going to be adding grunges and stuff into fill layers, just to slightly break up the color values and the roughness values because especially on clean cloth like this, it doesn't have a bunch of dirt and stuff on it. It can look really flat when you're rendering. And all of these grunges and stuff like that being added is purely there to break up that flatness because it's really hard to add extra detail and break up that flatness, because if you look at cloth in real life, it's actually fairly flat. There isn't that much color variation, but, of course, in real life, you know, it still looks good. You don't pay attention to it being flat. But when you're rendering something out and you notice that it's just a flat texture with no variation across it, it just looks kind of bad, so you have to do quite a bit of work to get that sort of variation across and not have it just look like you just slapped a smart material on there. And called it a day. So I'm just adding a high frequency grunge. So when I say high frequency, I mean, lots of little dots, lots of, you know, all of the details are smaller, and then I'm having a lower frequency noise. So here, the details are sort of larger, and those sort of stack up on top of each other. So I have this lower frequency noise that's on top, at a very low value, and it's just adding these larger patches of lighter values. And then the higher frequency above is sort of adding that fine grain noise. And that's another common way to do this. Is to combine a lower frequency and a higher frequency to sort of add a double breakup. Because if you just apply a very even fine noise to everything, that also ends up looking, you know, very flat, very monotone, right, because just even noise does not really add that much breakup. It just looks the same all across. So by combining a high frequency noise and a low frequency noise, you can sort of get more patchiness, more variation. And I'm keeping this effect very subtle, right? So it just has to be barely visible. I don't want it to be blatantly visible that I've highlighted all of the curves, all of the raised parts because, you know, that makes it look kind of stylized if it's too obvious. And I don't want that. I want it to just barely be visible just so it's adding a little bit of difference, a little bit of highlighting. And it's making the cloth look a little bit softer, in my opinion. So this is about as far as I want to push the values. So there's a little bit I have to clean up with this pad on the side. You can see around the edges, there's something showing up from the underlying layers, which is a little bit annoying around the sere edge, especially in the base color, it's visible. So I need to go ahead and clean that up. Um there is a little bit of a patch of the red material that hasn't been masked off properly there as well, but there seems to be something else causing this masking issue with the base color sort of showing through there. So I have to go ahead and figure out what's causing it. It doesn't seem to be anything from the underlying layers. So if I zoom in closely, I can actually see the blank texture grid, you know, the grid that sort of applies to the model when you have no texture applied. So what I realized was the issue is that this isn't masked completely to a white value, so it's only partially masked. And to fix that, I'm just going to add a levels effect, and I'm just going to slightly push the white value upwards so that this gets pushed to a completely white mask, and there you go. That issue is fixed. Now there's a little bit of the metalness from the underlying red layer poking through here, so I'm just going to grab a round brush and paint that away. And there's that issue fixed. So now I can move on to the next part. So that's going to be the cape. So I'm going to take another look at the concept and see what's going on there. So I can see that the cape is actually the same material as the hoodie. So I have to pick something that will work for both. And also the impression that I'm getting from the concept is that it's a kind of glossy material, like maybe silky or something like that, something kind of reflective and shiny. So I'm going to try and look for something like that. I feel like it would be a good idea to go for a shinier type of fabric just to mix things up with all of the different fabrics that I have going on here. So I've set the base color here roughly to what the concept has, and I'm going to search through the materials I have here. So I have this satin fabric that I downloaded from substance three D, and I'm just going to get the height range into position here and scale it up and see how this looks. So 32 is too big of a scale. I can't see the actual texture of the fabric at all there, so I'm going to lower this value down a bit to where I can start to see the pattern. And looking at this material, I actually don't really like it. I don't think it's a great fit. So I think I'm going to replace this with something else. So just deleting that layer and I'm going to try this blue fabric right here. So it's called performance fabric soft. That's also from substance three D, and I'm going to color pick from the concept to get roughly the right color here. I feel like this one works a lot better. I didn't really like the diagonal weave of the last one. I felt like that kind of didn't work with what kind of fabric this is meant to be. You know, you typically don't wear stuff like that around your face because that's, like, a heavier type of fabric that isn't comfortable to have around your neck. So I feel like this one works a little bit better with what I have in mind. So now I'm going to set up the height range, just like the normal detail, and I'm going to keep it quite low. One thing I did notice was the height range is kind of bumpy, so I think that's like an additional detail map that you can set up on top of the normal map because the normal map is a lot more flat. So I ended up having to go with normal map more than with the height range because the normal map is a little bit more even and consistent consistent, whereas the height range was as you saw, they're very bumpy. So turned the height range down quite a lot, and instead, I added in the normal channel. I've mentioned before that I prefer working with height channels over normal channels. So whenever there is a fabric that does let you just use the height channel, I would suggest doing that because height is so much easier to work with than normals. It's just one value, right, black to white, whereas normals are three values, and they're much harder to adjust, whereas height can be converted to normal without any quality loss. So usually when you're working, try and work with heights channels instead of the normal channel. The normal channel is much less useful. But in these cases, when I'm using materials from substance three D, some of them don't really come with a good height channel, which honestly is a little bit disappointing on substance three D's part, right? So yeah, that's one thing to keep in mind. Now I'm adding that curvature, highlighting detail that I always add, and on top of this, I'm going to add a fill and sort of mask out some of that curvature according to the actual detail of the weave of this material. So I'm adding an anchor point to the base layer so that I can reference either the height or the base color or something from that layer in this fill layer that I put above the curvature for the highlight layer. So I've set this fill layer to reference that anchor point, and now I'm going to set the blending mode to something that'll work for this, not normal, of course. And I'm going to set it to reference the height layer now. And I can also play with the levels to get this to be a little bit more visible. So now that it's referencing the height layer, I just need to set up the blending mode, how it's going to blend with the curvature below it. So if I set it to multiply, that seems to be working somewhat. It's adding a little bit of variation there, but overlay seems to do a little bit better. So I'm going to go with overlay, and so this looks okay, but it's not really doing a great job of getting across, you know, that correlation between the base layer below it, you know, the fabric we've there and this sort of highlight detail. So I'm going to try referencing a different channel, like base color, maybe. And if I reference the base color and then set auto on all of the levels and maybe bring down the white value a little bit more, you can see that the pattern is really coming through quite clearly, and that's making this curvature work pretty well. So I feel like that looks quite good. So I'm going to go with that. I've set the fill layer to overlay. I'm referencing the base color from the anchor point, and I've brought the white value down really low so that, you know, the anchor point is actually, you know, showing something. And now I'm just going to bring down the opacity a little bit, so this effect is very subtle. And I'll add some roughness to this layer as well. Just so there is roughness variation in this material, too, because roughness is just as important as color, especially on a shinier material. As lights pan around, that roughness detail will really show up and be visible. So don't neglect your roughness channels. Next, I want to add some stitching around the edges of this cape as well, just to add a little bit more to it because right now, it's just a flat piece of fabric. So I think some stitching around the sides will help add a little bit of more of a flow to it. And also, there does seem to be a seam around the edges that is sort of demanding stitching, right? Because the stitches have to go somewhere, right. There's no other reason for that seam there, so I'm going to have to trace some stitching around the edges of this cape. So once again, I'll probably fast forward through all of this because it's quite boring to watch me stitch and follow a seam around a rectangle, I think you all know how to do that by now. So I'm just going to fast forward through this process. All I'm doing right now is just picking a color for the stitching that won't stand out too much. I covered this last time I talked about the stitching, so I won't go into it anymore. I'm just going to go ahead and fast forward through this for you. So that's the stitching done here. I can move on to the next thing I want to do. And I'm looking at this cape right now, and it's still looking very even. The sort of curvature detail that I added is, you know, really subtle, and I don't want it to not be subtle. I do want to keep it subtle, but I also do want to add a little bit more variation and a little bit of breakup to this. So I'm just going to add a fill layer and layer a couple of granules into it. Just to introduce a little bit more of that, you know, variation, breakup, like I said, and maybe a little bit more roughness variation as well. So I'm going to search through all of these grunges and find one that is suitable. Now, you know, I can't really give any advice on how to pick the perfect grunge map. Just look for something that sort of seems like it'll work, I guess. You know, I'm just guessing when I pick these as well. For some of these, it's quite obvious which ones you don't want. I don't want stuff with, like, very visible scratches or cracks or, you know, shapes in it that wouldn't be on this type of cape. Generally, you know, just sort of like cloudy, abstract, noisy shapes is what I'm going for when I'm just adding some general breakup to a piece of cloth or something like that. So, you know, there's lots to choose from. Some are more like photo related. Others are just, you know, mathematical noises, like, you know, purlin noise and stuff like that. So you know, you can pick between the more procedural ones or the ones that are just photo textures, in the case of a piece of cloth like this, I don't want any sort of recognizable shapes, right? I don't want some sort of grunge that's like fingerprints or finger marks on a piece of cloth that wouldn't really make sense. So I'm going with this dried dirt one. I think this one works quite well. It's quite noisy, but it also has, you know, some sort of interesting pattern to it. And again, this is going to be so low in opacity that you won't really be able to recognize the shapes. It's just there to add a little bit of variation so that when you're looking at the cloth, it's not all just one really flat color. It makes it look a little bit more three D or a little bit more real when there's just a tiny, tiny amount of variation in there. So I'm dialing in the base color now. I want this to be barely visible or really basically not visible at all unless you check the base color channel, right? I don't want it to stick out that there is some sort of, like, major variation in the actual color on this. I want it to be, so subtle that you can't really tell, but, you know, it is having a sort of visual effect. You just can't identify that this piece of cloth has splotches on it, but yeah. And I'm trying to dial in the roughness here as well now. So I'm setting up the blending mode because I don't want this to just replace all of the roughness beneath it. I want it to add on top of it. I'm trying to get a value that isn't too bright and obvious, but it's still sort of visible. So you can see that this roughness map is really adding a lot of breakup to this cloth. It's, uh, yeah, definitely sort of breaking it down into these little splotches and making it look less flat. Overall, I think this is still a little bit shiny, but, you know, it's good enough for this sort of first pass on all of the cloth, and this is something to dial in and work on a little bit more once I have all of the other parts finished because then I'll be able to sort of compare things to each other and see how the colors work with each other and the work needs more detail and what needs less. So I'm going to work on this little pink tag that's sort of being left behind now. So I just need to find the layer that it belongs to. So here it is. Under the loose cloth folder, there is a separate folder for this tag. So now I can get rid of this material that's been randomly placed in there and replace it with the actual material for this little pink label or whatever it is. Now, I probably could have actually just shared these layers, you know, put both of these tags in the same layer. But, you know, it's sort of how I've ended up laying out my folders. It doesn't really make a difference. I am going to have to repeat some of these steps, but, you know, it's not really too much work. I might consolidate these layers into one later on and just have all of the pink tags be in one separate folder by themselves. And that would let me work on all of them at once. But for now, I'm going to copy paste the entire folder from the first tag. And since I've copy pasted it, I need to just remove the masks from that folder because the tag is already masked out in the folder above it. And with the masks removed, now it's, you know, all of the color and also the edge highlighting, the sort of grunge has already been applied to it from, you know, the folder structure that was already there that I copy pasted. So now I just have to clean up the masking on this a little bit because some of this stuff isn't masked out properly. So I have to go to the layer above and remove this little end piece. And then clean up the edges a little bit as well because they're kind of rough. So I'm going to go ahead and do that right now. So this edge isn't quite reaching the tag, so I need to add a little bit more mask here. Actually, that's the underlying layer. So, yeah, I need to make sure that I'm doing this with the correct layer in mind since I have a separate layer structure for the outer edge and the inside. Now that I'm up close with this sort of material that I've chosen for the edge of this cloth, I don't really like it. I don't think it's very fitting of the Sci Fi theme, so it might be something I will change later. But for now, I'm going to keep it as it is. There's sort of, you know, still a placeholder for now. It's at least got some texture to it and it has the right color. So I can keep it as it is for now. Then when I get around to tweaking everything and doing the final pass, I will fix it up. So now I'm going to mask in that blank area to this tag as well just because what I think I'll do for the areas that are sort of, you know, a sort of cavity right here that's sort of just being baked down onto the low poly. What I'll do here is I'll just paint in a dark ambient occlusion value, maybe a bit of a dark base color, and it'll just sort of look like a dark shadow in that area where the sort of, you know, the gap between the actual cloth and this rubber tag has sort of been baked into the low poly. That's probably what I'm going to do there because it doesn't make sense to have a fabric texture in there. And it also doesn't make sense to have that be solid rubber either because it looks a little bit awkward. Now I'm just painting this area into the main mask for the entire cloth because it was masked out before. So yeah, when you have stacks of masks on top of each other, like a mask for the main folder, and then further masks within the main folder to mask off separate areas of that main folder, you sort of have to pay attention and go through all of the masks and make sure that the thing you want is correct in all of them. Otherwise, you know, you'll end up being frustrated as to why you can't paint on an area that you think is masked in, but maybe it's masked out in some layer that's above it or folder that's above it. So pay attention to that. Now I'm just going to paint on the same label or text or graphic pattern that I used for the last tag just because I don't want to be coming up with something new for each one. The resolution in the concept art is unfortunately too low to be able to tell what they say exactly. And, you know, I really hate having to come up with imaginary labels and stuff and what to put on them. So I'm just going to use the same texture that I made before in Photoshop. If you can come up with something better to put on these, then by all means, go ahead. But I'm just going to stick with this. So I'm going to make sure to pick the correct texture. So that would be this one. It's a little bit longer, sort of fit the shape of the label a little bit better and holding it down S while I'm using the projection tool to move the stencil around into position so that it's in the right spot. So something like this, but maybe a little bit bigger, so it takes up more space on the label, so there's less, empty room below it, because if it's too empty, then it sort of looks like it doesn't quite fit the shape that's been made for it. So think something like this should work. Let me take a look in the three D view. And yeah, I think that's going to be okay. So let me set up the material settings for this now. So I'm just going to drag the material properties tab out. And I'm going to keep it here on the top corner because that means I have to scroll through stuff a little bit less. I've been doing that for most of this chapter now. So I'm going to add a very low height value just so this is a little bit embossed, just like the other part. And I'll make sure that it's the same color. Another thing that I realized is that there's a little bit of a gray top to this label, so I'm going to add another layer and add a black mask and then add a paint on it and just paint out the very tip of this little thing. Like so. So I just want to make sure this is nice and straight and even and not wonky. That's one thing you do have to be careful about when you're hand painting details, right? It's very easy to make a jagged edge, and that stuff shows up in the final product, right? So try and keep things as straight as possible when you're doing stuff like this. Now I'll just color pick the correct color here. And maybe add a little bit of a height value. So this is, you know, it's not like a seamless transition between colors of rubber, so it looks like a different piece of rubber that's been put on top. So that's all for the label. Now, the last thing I want to do is fill in this arm hole because right now it's a bright white. So if you're looking at the arm and you see a bright white on the inside of the vest, that's obviously going to be a little bit jarring and it won't look very good. So I need to fill this in with something that will basically be really inconspicuous if you take a look at it and you see the end cap for some reason, you know, at some odd angle of the camera. That's, you know, just in line with the hole enough to where you can see, you know, a little bit too much of this inner hole. And for that, I'm just going to, you know, add this area to the main vest material. And that way, it'll just sort of blend into the shirt. So if you do end up seeing this, you'll just think that, you know, that's part of the shirt that you can see on the inside. So the next thing I'm going to do is paint in some ambient occlusion here just so this area is even darker if you do for some reason, manage to catch a glimpse of it. And that way, you know, it'll look even more like it's just a hole in shadow, right? So I'm going to add a new layer and set it, so it only affects the ambient occlusion channel. And then I'm just going to paint in a mask, and I'll have the ambient occlusion value set to black for this material. So I'm just going to go ahead and paint it in. Now, I'm not 100% sure if I ever recorded and showed you how to add material channels to your layers, you know, because the ambient occlusion channel isn't there by default. I just noticed this as I was doing the voiceover for this video, right, that, you know, it wasn't shown me adding that ambient occlusion channel. So I'm not sure if maybe I had the recording paused when I did that or not. So I'm just going to go ahead and put in a little segment of me setting up that ambient occlusion slot right here as soon as I'm done filling in this paint for the ambient clusion. So that's the first pass for the entire body material basically done now. There's a sort of good base for every single material in here, and it looks reasonably close to the final result. Now, what I'm going to do in the next chapters is, do this first pass for all of the va materials, so the arm and the accessories and the skin. And once I have a first pass on everything, then I'll head into Maze tool bag and set up the specific shader settings for each material. So for the cloth, there's going to be a few fuzz shader options to make it look a little bit more fuzzy and soft. And then for skin, of course, there is going to be subsurface scattering. Or the hard surface parts, it's really not too much to do there. The default PBR settings work well for most metal and hard surface objects. It's really just stuff like cloth and skin, which are slightly more complex materials that need that additional shader work. And then once I have these shaders set up and the lighting in Mama set tool Bank setup, I will then go back and tweak all of these materials down to the final level of finishing, right? So I will go in and make sure that all of the colors match each other that there's a little bit of shadowing between materials and enough color breakup. So yeah, don't like work all of these materials to their final extent before you have everything set up in Mum se tool bag and before you have a good base for all of the other materials done, right? Because not only do you have to make everything work within the material, you have to make all of the different material groups work with each other. So yeah, it's best to work gradually through each part, right? Get everything finished up to a certain level, and then you can sort of look at everything in the whole and decide what you need to adjust from there. So that's going to be all for this chapter. Thanks for watching. 81. 13 Arm Material Creation Part01: Hi. This is Chapter 13 of texturing. And in this one, I am moving on to all of the mechanical body parts. So I think I'm going to start with the easy thing and get this cloth stuff out of the way before I get to work on all of the mechanical stuff. Or actually on second thought, I think I might leave this for a little bit later when I get around to the accessories because I see that the gloves share some of the materials with the arms. So maybe it's best to do those things together, and I'll focus on the mechanical hard surface parts instead. So this can be a little bit tricky sometimes, especially when it's a cleaner sort of look with less, grunge and all that kind of stuff on it. I'm going to start with maybe the gold. So right now, it's extremely simple material. It's only really just a gold color and a metallic value. So it's not really doing much at all right now. I've been searching around for a few references, and I found this sort of gold automotive paint sample, and those kind of paint flex and little bits, I think, is something I'm going to want to replicate. Although, what you'll notice here is, this is not entirely metallic, it's sort of more the opposite of metallic. The technical term is dielectric. You can just call it nonmetal, I guess, if you don't want to be nerdy. But yeah, I think I'm going to go for something that is completely metallic unlike this. I just like these little pink flex and that variation. So I'm going to try and replicate that. So for this color, the gold on the character seems a little bit more desaturated, and I do feel like this is very yellow. So I'm going to desaturate it a bit. I think that looks a little bit better. And now I'm going to start adding some of that paint. So I think there is a texture that will work perfectly for this. I'll add a fill. And somewhere in here, there should be a sort of galvanic texture that looks a lot like paint flex. So let's see. There is a galvanic large and a galvanic small, so I'm going to try the galvanic small. And even though it says it's small, it's actually quite big still. So I'm going to increase the tiling and I'll set up the material properties. So I don't want to affect the metalness, just the color and the roughness for now. And I'll see if I want to do anything about the height. And for this, I'll firstly color pick the color from the body. Yeah, something like this. Okay, so time to scale this up to the appropriate size. I Okay, that doesn't look very good. I'll try this one instead because this sort of has less of that silly stuff, so maybe this will work slightly better. Although when it's tiling this much, it doesn't look great. So some textures, you know, even though you can increase the tiling as much as you want, at a certain point, it just becomes too the tiles become too obvious, and, yeah, you can use another texture to sort of break that up, but it's only going to go so far, you know? So that's something to sort of look out for. So I think instead of all of these, I'm going to go for there are these sort of noises that look like this, these cells maybe. And this might work quite well as well if I just increase the size a lot to do something like 64. Okay. Let's see. I'll lower the size a little bit. And I can increase the disorder and lower the scale. Okay, so that's adding this sort of random noise. Now I'll slightly change up the roughness value. Let me check the roughness channel very quickly. I think I like that. Yeah, I think that works quite well, but it's very even across the whole model, maybe I'll add a little bit of curvature to mask that out in some areas. So let me see the mask now. Set this to, let's see. Linear dodge isn't quite what I want. Multiply probably works better. Now this is making it a little bit more obvious around edges. Maybe I want the opposite effect, so to sort of smooth it out around the edges. Let's see what the base color looks like. Yeah, something like this, but maybe not 100% opaque and I'll slightly lower the width. Let me take a look at this mask very quickly. Okay, something like that, and I'll lower the opacity so it's not 100% masking these out. And yeah, I'll go for this and I'll slightly lower the color opacity. So there we go. That's adding a little bit of variation. Now for some edgeware, I'm going to add a new layer and add a mask again. And there are some smart masks, so I'll try one of those. You can always build your own, of course, but I find these work quite well as a starting point and then I can build up from them further. So I don't need too much on here, so I don't need something like Edges Uber. I think I'll go with Edges strong. Even though it's called Edges strong, it's not really that strong, I find. And this mask is a little bit annoying, so I'll paint out the mask a little bit. I don't like the seam down the middle. It's definitely not meant to be Okay. So, this maskin is definitely too strong for now. Let me go into the mask so I can tweak it a little bit better. So most of this is going to be under curvature, so I can lower these down. Let me go into the material here so I can see what's going on. So for this layer, right now, I'll do just roughness, and I'll make this quite rough compared to the surrounding areas. Then I'll add a little bit of color, and I'll keep this on normal fan out and just make it not very opaque and make the color a kind of I'm not sure exactly what would work here, but it needs to be kind of more gray compared to everything else. I feel so maybe something like this. It's still quite light. I'll try that. So let me check the base color now. It's not really showing up on the base. I'll increase the opacity slightly, and I'll play with the masks and more. Et's see how this looks. Very even right now. Maybe I'll try edges strong Edge is strong, scratched instead. This is just too even. I could add a texture on top to break that up, but this smart mask already comes with that, so I wouldn't need to do that. Seems like this one's really low resolution, though, out the gate, more there's something going on. Let's see, under the texture panel, I should be able to scale this up. That just doesn't seem to be working properly. Um Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on now. I mean try a different texture in and see if it works a little bit better. Okay, so now it seems to be working better. Okay, I don't want to waste time figuring out how that one works. Instead, I'm going to use just the regular old metal edgeware generator. So sorry for wasting a bit of time there. So this one seems to be giving me a fairly good result right out of the gate without having to tweak anything. Okay, so let's see. This is somewhat close to what I want, but not quite. So let me adjust the color slightly. Something like this is maybe the color I want. And then as for the roughness, I don't want it getting too rough. Let me see if I want to add a tiny bit of height in here. So I'll make this minus point -0.001. Maybe that's helping a teensy bit, but it's masking out too much right now. I don't want this to look that worn. So I'll go into the mask options. And I'll lower this down a little bit. I'll get rid of some of that grunge that's in the middle of the panel because I'm going to be doing that myself in a different layer. I just want to do the edges right now. So lower the wear level. And let me see. I'll up the grunge amount a little bit lower the contrast. I don't want this to be very high contrast where I sort of want it to be sort of dull edgeware from, you know, it's not exactly scratches or paint being chipped off. It's just, you know, maybe around the edges paint is applied more thinly or it's just, you know, rubbed off ever so slightly. So I don't want this to be very intense. I'm going to up the grunge scale a lot cause I just want this to sort of be feathering the edge. I don't want it to really be doing too much else. So something like that, maybe. Let me take a look at the material. Yeah, let's see with or without. Okay, so this is something like what I'm going for. Again, it's kind of hard to tell on this sold. Maybe I'll lower the intensity of these a little bit more or just make it less saturated. And I'll make the main gold a tiny bit less saturated as well. And I'll increase the scale of this as well. Maybe I'll redo the saturation because it's a little bit too washed out now. And I'll make this a little bit more send out a little bit more. So let me check the base color. Okay, so something like that, probably. Okay. Let me check the roughness as well. Yeah. It's more or less what I want it to be like. I'll add another fill layer on top of this and I'll just put some scratches in here, this scratch is a rough material. I'll set this to lighten, I think. Let me check the mask. That's correct. Now I need to increase the scale on this quite a lot. Not that much. Maybe a little bit less than that. Something like this. And now I'm going to remove the dust more or less. Yeah, I don't need the dust. I don't need this many scratches. I just want the occasional scratch, and I can lower the width a little bit, and I'll get rid of the double scratches because I never really like those. I'll leave it in there a little bit, but I don't like too much. Okay. Let me just check the mask again. Okay. I'm gonna load the opacity of this a little bit 'cause they seem a bit intense and then I'll up the width to make them a little bit more visible. Adding some scratches. That catch the light at some angles. Not 100% sure on this really yet. I'm going to add another layer just for some general grunge, bit of variation in the roughness. So I'm going to add a fill and let's see what kind I want. Firstly, I'm going to add these spots. Want these maybe. I'll scale them up. Something like that, and I'll mask them out with another layer on top because I don't want them to be that consistent. I want it to be kind of randomized. So I will use one of these cloud layers to sort of break it up with a multiplier. So if I check the mask now and I scale this up a bit and change the balance, That's quite good. I'm going to add another layer on top for some more smudgy type roughness. Maybe this one and I'll set this to maybe lighten. I'll increase the scale. Maybe this one's a little bit too clear. This one maybe is going to work better. Although I don't really like that stain type of pattern, so maybe I'll pick a different one instead. Let's see if this one is too grungy. Maybe this soft one, and I'll alter the balance slightly. An increase of scale? No, that doesn't really work. Okay. So maybe back to this one or Maybe this one will work. So let me take a look at the material now. Okay. So I don't need this at 100%. Something like that. Let me see the mask again. I'm going to slightly lower the opacity of this. And let me see if I don't want to adjust the balance too much. I'll just barely lower the opacity again, or maybe I'll keep it where it is and I still need to change the color on the layer and make it metallic. So it's not very visible when I set the color value or when I set the metalness to, you know, metal. What I need to do is slightly lower the roughness, so it's a bit more visible. And for the color, you know, I'll have something from just the general material, but slightly desaturated. So Be aware that the color picker picks pixels from the viewboard, right? It's not going to pick your base color unless you're in base color mode. So you can see that it's picking up the highlight here, it's picking up the midtones here. Sometimes it can be useful. Sometimes, you want to switch to base color. So here, I want this sort of grandula just to be slightly desaturated from the main stuff, so I can pick a sort of more shadowy value and that'll work. So let me see what the roughness channel looks like. So right now this roughness is barely visible, so I'm going to increase it a little bit. So it actually shows up. And let's see. You know, it's hard to judge a substance painter with the viewpot the way that it is. You know, this is going to be something that I'll have to tweak down the line a little bit once it gets into MamastTolbg. But there are a few more things I want to add to this layer. So these bolts don't look great when they're just the same color as everything else. It doesn't really make sense. So I'm going to add not a black mask, a new layer, and I'm going to get these bolts in. So I add a black mask, and I'm just going to paint them. This might be easier to do in the two D view, actually. So let me go ahead and find them and get to work on this. Going to pick a hard edged brush to make this a little bit easier. And I'm going to try and paint this with the mouse because I don't really want to switch to switch my camera view or what I'm recording right now. I'm going to go through and try and paint all of these out as best I can. Yeah, I'm going to have to switch to my other screen. Okay, here I am on the other screen. It's going to be a little bit easier now. In fact, on this screen, I think I'll switch to the three DV. That'll give me a better idea of what's going on. A Okay, I think that's all of them. There's one more over here. Okay, now that's all of them. I don't think they're all perfectly done. You know, some of them seem a little bit wonky, but I'll fix that later. Now, I actually feel like I need to make a folder for this. I'm gonna copy this mask and paste it into a folder. And now I can drag this layer in there and remove the mask from it. And these are still masked out, so that's great. And now I can figure out what material I want for these. I basically want a kind of dark metal to sort of contrast with the gold. So I'll just pick one of these. Let's see. Something like this one. Yeah, that's working quite well. Maybe it's a little bit too dark, so I'll lighten the value slightly to something like that. Then maybe I'll add a bit of a height value here because right now it's sort of blending into the surface. So if I add some height. So move the height position, let's see, up more down slightly. But it has to be very slight. Otherwise, it kind of looks janky. Neither of these look that great. But maybe it'll be okay. Another thing I want to do is add some kind of ambient occlusion around these. Maybe I'll do that in a general layer outside of this one, and I'll add another layer on top of the scratches on this one. So I'll add a black mask and I'll add a generator, and I'll use the metal edgeway generator again and I'll lower the weight level to where I can still kind of see these. I'll say lower the contrast too. Something like that. I'll make this very shiny compared to the other stuff. So I'll have the value quite light and the roughness pretty low. So this is worn metal edges, something like that. Now to add the ambient occlusion or, you know, dark stuff in the crevices. Maybe this is more of a cavity thing. I'll add another layer on top of this and add another black mask. And let's see, I'll add the curvature generator and see what I can get out of that. So I'll lower all of these larger values. And I'll check out what the mask looks like. So this right now is on edges. I want this to be on cavities. Yeah, that's exactly what I want. And I need to set this to a darker value instead of a lighter one. So something like this seems to be doing it, and I'll set it to multiply so that it makes everything darker. And I'll make it a little bit more rough to make it slightly more dark. And I don't need the height or any of these other channels, I guess. Okay. So that's a good start on this. Let's see how this looks. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Definitely needs a little bit more work around everything here, but it's a good start. So let me clean up the mask here as well a little bit. Okay. So that'll do for now on the gold. Now I can move on to some of these other parts. So the next part I'm going to do is this black plastic area that sort of goes over most of the arm, you know, and makes up most of the body. As you can see in the concept, it's just left to mostly be a sort of grayish black. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to have it be somewhere in the 0.35 range in terms of roughness. I want it to be quite shiny so that I can add a little bit more grunge on top of it. So it'll be like a shiny plastic with some wear and tear on it, but not too much because this is a fairly clean character. So I need to make sure I don't overdo any sort of wear and tear. And for the color, I'm just going to go with a fairly dark value with a tiny bit of blue just to, you know, put in some more color into the character so it's not all gray. And the rest of these I've just left empty pretty much. Now the next layer I'll want to add is just a little bit of general roughness grunge. So I'll add a black mask to this, and the first thing as usual, I'll add to the mask is a fill so that I can get the best sort of grunge in. So over here, I'm going to go with I have a particular grunge map in mind. Now, what I'm going to do is try and mostly use assets that come with substance painter. I don't want to download too many new grunge maps just because I think that's a little bit frustrating if you're following along with a tutorial and I'm using grunge maps that I've acquired over the years and you have no access to, and I can't tell you where I got them because I don't remember. Like that's a little bit annoying. But by all means, you know, get some cool and very good grunge map packs and use them. You know, it does make things a little bit faster. It can help you get a slightly better result if you, you know, look around and get some good grunge maps. You can try and make them yourself, but that can be tricky and, you know, photography and substance design, that's a whole subject of its own. But yeah, you'll see me mostly using maps that come with substance painter. Definitely don't just limit yourself to that, you know, there's definitely nothing wrong with downloading grunge maps to make, you know, your workflow a little bit faster and a little bit better. But yeah, I'm just sort of explaining why I'm mostly sticking to substance painter stuff. So the grunge I'm looking for is grunge brushed. It's this one. And this will just sort of help give the impression that it's a piece of plastic that's been brushed up against a lot, with all the cloth and, you know, arms brush up against things in general. So I thought this pattern would work well, you increase the timing to something that seems to sort of match the scale of the character. So something like that maybe. And maybe I'll slightly increase the rotation variation. But that doesn't really seem that important. I'll add another fill lay on top of this to add a little bit of breakup to this mask. This is just to sort of not have it look like, you know, just a pattern of brushing, right? Because right now it just looks like someone's going at this with a paint brush. That's not the look I want to go for. So I need something to really break this up quite a lot. So one of these maybe wipe smudgy soft and different blending mode to go on top of this. First, the scale needs to be right. Okay. So again, this is another type of grunge that you might see on a somewhat glossy type of plastic. These smudges. Ten seems to be working well. I'll set the blending mode to let's see. Let me go into the mask so I can see what I'm doing better. Okay. Not sure this is quite working yet. I want to add to the existing layer with this one. M. Maybe the scale of this is tiled slightly too much. Something like this is a little bit better and it's just breaking up the smudges. I think it's a little bit dark though right now. Let me just check a different blending mode. Again, multiplied doesn't seem to be quite what I want. Let me compare linear dodge and screen. And maybe I'll slightly increase the scale. Okay, yeah, that's more what I was going for. Okay, let me check the material view now. Of course, I want this really to mainly be in the roughness channel, so I'll just set it to roughness and I'll set this value to, let's say, 0.6. And now you can see it's sort of looking like a more brushed up piece of plastic. It's not completely flat color now. So this is in the realm of where I want to go with this, but, you know, I'll carry on adding layers and seeing what I end up with. So the next layer I want to add to this mask is, let me see the mask, actually. So right now this is really sharp. So maybe I'll add just a tiny blur on top of this, and I'll keep it at a very low value. So let me see what 0.1 looks like. Maybe 0.1 is a little bit too strong, so I'll put it at 0.05. Okay, that's really subtle, so maybe I'll put it at 0.06. And I think that's working quite well. And on top of that, let me see. Right now, you know, it's masking off most of the body and also the value range is really high, right? So I kind of want to even out the value ranges. I'm going to add a levels modifier or just levels, it's called, not a modifier. And I want to slightly play with the values to even them out, because what I'm going to do for the last sort of thing in the sack of layers in the mask is I'm going to add a curvature so that the areas more around curved areas are more effective. So in order for that to read well, I need more of this mask to sort of be masking stuff. So I don't want as many dark values. So I'm going to push the light values up a little bit more, something like that, and now I can add a curvature generator. And I need to set this to a different blending mode, of course. But maybe first, I'll set up the settings for the curvature. So I want to get rid of the huge, the big, and I'll leave a little bit of large, and let me see if I want the sharp detail. Maybe I don't really want it. So something like that, I think. And let me see what blending mode I should put this in. So Okay, that's kind of working. Okay, this is exactly what I'm looking for. So this adds up. I sort of, you know, adds and subtracts at the same time. Not 100% sure what kind of algorithm is going on there, but you can see it's added to the maski and sort of subtracted in other areas. So this is kind of what I'm looking for. But maybe I do want some of these large ones back a little bit more. So I just want there to be a little bit less were on these really flat areas, actually. I want more of the wear to be around the edges. And to have little rest areas like this. So something like this, I think is working quite well. Let's take a look at the material. Thank you. So something like that, you can see as the light comes across here, it's adding a nice bit of breakup. Maybe it's a little bit too rough right now. I'll set it to something like 0.55. It's a little bit more subtle. Shift R to rotate the light. That's the shortcut for that. So that's what I'm holding. So I think this is working pretty well. But maybe I'll just to make this add a little bit of color variation as well. So let me add a color channel and let me go into color mode and color pick the color channel, and I'll just have this be barely lighter. Then the rest of it and that'll bring out that roughness even more. It's really subtle, but it's there. I'll just change the blending mode as well to screen and I'll lower down the opacity so that if I put anything under this layer, it will still read a few through because it's not 100% opaqu, it's screening over it. So something in the range of this value. That's adding a nice bit of smudging around the edges. That's already doing a little bit of what I want. So the next layer I'm going to add is sort of edgeware where, you know, the most severe edgeware right where sort of the top layer of the material has been worn off and you're seeing some sort of, like, cross section of the material, something underneath the surface, that'll sort of, you know, add a little bit of depth to this material because right now, you know, it's just soft rubber, you can't really tell what it is. And having some slightly worn edges, I feel like is fairly nice. So I'm going to add fill here or maybe I should start with curvature. So yeah, what I'm going to do is I'll start with a curvature generator. And I just want this to be, just wear and tear in a few occasional spots. So I'll start by turning all of these down. So something like this. And maybe I'll up the balance. And on top of that, I'm going to stack an ambient occlusion to sort of mask away some of these areas. So it's not going around the entire edge. It's just going around some parts of the edge. So I'll add another generator, and there'll be an ambient occlusion one. And I need to set the blending mode to multiply, I think. Yeah, that seems right. Let me go into the mask view very quickly and start pushing around the I guess contrast maybe and lowering the balance so that you can see that only some of these areas getting masked out here. So let me wait for it to save for a second. And I think something like this is, you know, just about what I want. So now on top of this, I'm going to add a fill layer, and this will be the sort of texture of the actual were, right? So let me go back into the textures panel and f