GAME-READY PROCESS PART 3

Let's continue the military dude character - Today I was busy with fixing UV Islands and I will show you in detail what normally needs fixing the most. Then we will move to my favorite part - Baking the textures. This is where the absolute magic happen!

A quick checker texture test - looks nice

This checker texture is actually good to go and at this point we could already take it into Baking Process and Substance Painter for texturing. But there is still few parts we need to be careful about to make our life easier later and on top of that - this is the professional way. This character has lots of elements like belts and straps on the knees and arms, these are just cylindrical straight objects but they unwrap like this even if you place your seams correctly -

these straps can work, but it's just not cool to leave it like this, mostly because it will be harder to texture these guys because they are bent, even though they are just straight looping rings around legs or arms

So here's what we need to - every cylindrical object needs to be straightened out and cleaned, the best option is to just turn it into a flat grid like in the image below:

In Maya this is called "Straighten UVs" but it is not automatic so you have to also use "Optimize" button sometimes and also drag vertices around manually and use "Smooth Tool" to achieve perfect result.

See these cylindrical objects like straps, rings, gas mask? Edge flow goes in a straight line around the object, and even though it feels straight - on the UV Map it will be bent and it will add unwanted chaos to our clean game-ready process.

This is what we need to achieve - all looping cylindrical objects has to be straightene out with mix of tools and buttons like "Straighten UVs", "Optimize" and manual dragging and scaling vertices on UV Islands.

This looks way cleaner and will work properly on texturing, this approach also reduces visual artifacts like "pixel ladders"

When this part is done it's time to pack all of the UV islands into one single square texture map.

This time I used automatic layout with some tweaks in settings

I used automatic layout this time because this is a personal project and there is no need to be ultra economical, but if your game or character needs to use all of the possible space on the texture map then you might want to layout the islands manually (will take quite some time if you have many islands)

On top of that I will be texturing in 4K, which will give me extra pixels so this automatic layout looks already good enough for my needs.

Always remember to keep all the islands same size. Use "Get" and "Set" buttons in Transform section.

NOW LET'S BAKE

Now I will show you where the magic happens - baking is when you take your high poly original sculpt from let's say Zbrush. Take it into your baking software, and then bake from highpoly to this lowpoly model that we just did retopology and the UV islands for.

Lowpoly model that I have just finished UV unwrapping and imported into Marmoset Toolbag

For baking I used Marmoset Toolbag, I tried baking in Blender and Substance Painter but for my taste Marmoset works the best and the experience is the most pleasing. I used to hate baking but Marmoset made it somewhat fun.

Baked normals from high-poly. Looks way juicier but wait, AO is coming!

As you can see now the model is improved drastically, but let's bake AO and the rest of the maps.

This looks like a proper high poly mesh with some raytracing. WIN!

Everything baked perfectly from the first try (mostly because from my previous experiences I have learned what creates errors and am avoiding doing same mistakes. baking is quite predictable.)

What you see is the normal and AO information from high poly sculpt being "rendered" or "painted" on a low poly mesh on THOSE EXACT LITTLE UV ISLANDS that I showed you in the beginning of the post. If your islands are nice - baking will also turn out nice. In total I baked Normals, Ambient Occlusion, ColorIDs, Cavity, Curvature, Worldspace Normals.

NOW LET'S IMPORT INTO SUBSTANCE PAINTER

We are ready to texture! So I opened Substance Painter and imported the low poly mesh and also imported all the baked texture maps that I just showed you above.

All the maps look clean in Substance Painter, everything works like a clock.

Let's also check the ColorID map (we will like super-need it later)

eyecandy!

This funny colorful map is very important and in later posts I will show you why.

For now let's do the last thing - my favorite. Paint on the texture to check how the model reacts and try to find any errors!

error check - everything looks working perfectly.

I do these random brush strokes to find any errors on the UV-map of the model, but it seems like everything is fine apart from one single thing -

This gas mask looks a bit pixelated and I may need to go back to the UV phase and scale it up a bit.

Apart from this everything looks great and we will be covering TEXTURING in the next post.

If you have any UV or baking related questions - hit me up!

See you soon.