Still watching this more than a year later. It all clicks even more now that I got my first junior job as an environment artist. Just listening to this while working away haha. Hope all is well with you Tim, thanks again for these! Peace.
That's so cool. Congrats! I've got a question. I've watched a lot of videos on exterior environment/level design, but how do you start with an interior location? I know for a dungeon the modular approach makes sense but what about buildings?
I'm a little late to the party but I wanted to say thanks for posting these videos. As someone who's trying to learn environment art. Being able to see these breakdowns and hear about what's going through your head when you create modular environments like these is a huge help for me! :D
This was an awesome video! I make assets this same way. One big perk to doing larger modular pieces as well is that it will equate to fewer draw calls, and especially on Switch/Mobile games that's really important.
I just saw your work on artstation yesterday and I loved it. I came across the videos linked in the feudal japan piece and I've watched all of them! Really love how you spoke clearly, directly, yet naturally about everything, it was almost like you were my friend Devon from my university and you were helping me with homework. My favorite part was when showed the scene in unreal with the wall going through the wall and saying 'it's OK for this to happen' I'm always scared cause when I'm in school doing 3D environments my teachers point out my waste of geometry! Looking forward to more of your videos in the future and if you'd be down for doing a twitch live stream one day that would be great too! :D
alex achim awesome! Thanks for the love :) yea a little waste in polys vs spending time fixing something that isnt effecting performance is fine. Time investment almost always dictates my actions ;) i might do fb live or stream on here when i get some free time haha
@@PolygonAcademy I was rewatching your video and I was thinking to myself at 5:00 when you talked about all the modular assets, especially the smaller ones, how do you handle UVing them? Like when you are working on AAA games, do you unwrap them and put a bunch of meshes UVs on a single UV sheet? I imagine the large pieces like walls/doors etc would have an entire UV sheet to itself.
For a lot of things i use tiling textures and dont uniquely unwrap things in a 0-1 layout, tiling textures and trims make up a lot of environment work, for this poject i am doing more unique unwraps to shake it up and try other workflows, but for most games, tiling textures and trims will be a big part of environment work. Ill touch on that in the textures/materials vlog coming soon :) but if you want to know more asap, just search for vids on tiling textures and trim sheets 👍
i feel silly having written a question in the previous video asking about secondary pieces and I got the answer in this video. thank you for sharing the tips and knowledge.
This is the best video I have ever seen! Like... man, I've created a lot of sets for UE4, mostly modular environments, all of those full of little details. Thanks to this video I was able to re-package all the assets and remove like... 80% of the content! Thank you"
Seriously Tim these step by step vids are awesome!! Keep up the great work and I'm also following everything on Artstation so can't wait to see how this turns out :D
Hello dear Tim, I am learning very awesome things from your tutorials. Thanks for sharing this with us. Please breakdown another environment. I am thirsty about your new tutorials.
One more subscriber! I really like where you place your camera for your videos. It feels like I'm right next to you and looking at your computer. Great videos! Thx!
thanks! its a combo of a small apartment and also wanting to make it feel like me and you guys are just hanging out! I hate formal education and that power dynamic haha.
Hey! Really loving the videos.. being into this over 8 years now, modularity (specifically textures) have always stumbled me. In terms of textures and draw calls, would the walls, then Windows, then roof all be their own texture timetable of would you put them on an atlas? What's the best industry working practice for buildings with that? Can never find that any where. How in-depth you are in this series is incredible, I really love it! Thank you
For most modular kits you are going to want to use a combo of tiling textures and trim sheets. You can use an atlas but it makes your kit less reuseable and harder to quickly swap surface materials because the uvs are more specificly laid out instead of more generic tiling materials. I wouldnt worry too much about drawcalls for personal work, chances are unless you have 5+ material ids on each mesh you are fine ;)
nice video....you could decrease amount of poly in your models because even with LOD there are too many poly...your workflow is very helpful, i work in blender there is a modifier called decimate what is does i basically reduce geometry without changing its shape im sure 3DS max have a modifier with same feature....should try it with your workflow and might be able to get more performance
yea its pretty high poly but for a scene like this its fine, the LODs do their job agressively, on those walls, once the camera is more than 3m away it cuts the polycount in half. I used similar polycounts to this to the environments we are building at work and similar models we had on farcry 4. 3ds max has a pro-optimize modifier, sounds like a version of the decimate modifier :)
this was awesome!!, please, I'm really searching for a long long modular tutorial like this, but more longer with nice detail about how to create modular UV's or how to set up modules for anything, You could think about to create something like this tutorial but getting more depper about modular kits?
Irensay yea i will be making more tutorials on this subject soon, and eventually have a super in depth environment creation course that covers every single aspect in depth step by step. Just gotta find the time to make it 😂
Hey Tim! First I'd like to say: Amazing videos! Invaluable output/input your putting together. Super enjoyable also. Thanks from the heart for the effort making all these! Instant sub and looking forward to watch all the rest! I have a question which bothers me quite a while, maybe you have some general guideline or advice: When planning for modular environments with big pieces: when is the actual moment where the piece gets too big and you won't be able to bake out a normal from a high poly anymore? Like lets say, I have a huge tree, maybe 15 meters high, and it should have about a certain texel density like lets say 512px/cm or 1024px per cm. But the texture would be huge and actually require a lot of res to get the enourmous size covered with enough density to carry the high res. Like 4k or multiple 4ks or so. Which obviously wouldn't be very efficient. That is, if you are able to cover a tree of that size in the first place, since it's unlikey when staying inside the 0-1 space , which is required for baking. I know such pieces commonly get scaled outside the 0-1 UV space and are textured with tiling textures in engine. Which makes perfect sense. But that wouldn't make it possiblee to bake a HP onto it for unique detail. So my question is: How and when do you decide that you can't use a high res sculpt for your assets anymore to bake them on a big sized object? And need to stick with tiling textures only? I assume working to go round about matching a certain consistent texel density across your assets is key to a succsesfull envirnoment. And I see that with large brick walls you can sculpt the individual bricks and group them together. However, for example, your wood pieces are rather long. How do you ensure they stay inside the 0-1 space ? Being non stretched or nearly non stretched and hit a certain texel desnsity? This always confuses me about environment design. As well as with the design of large Boss like characters. Because I think they do have a normalmap, too, right ? Mabye you could even do a video on this? Talking about texel density in general and maybe on the way cover this special topic or problematic? Would be a total blast! :D
Harry Sanders one option that lots of people use for trees or rocks is to bake out a unique 0-1 normal at like 2k on uv channel 2, and then also tile detail maps on channel 1 to get the overall resolution sharp. Most games dont use 4k maps at all, they are too memory intensive. Even god of war mostly used 1k maps for the most part.
Another option for like the boss character situation would be to use multiple maps and materials, like a 2k for the head and a 2k for the torso, and one for the legs etc. Also, thanks for the sub!
Was just wondering if you would do a video on the texturing side of things ? Im having some difficulty on the best way to go about it and understanding trim sheets
Another great video! I have a question. You said you put the pivot point all in the same place. Where exactly did you put it? The center, bottom, bottom left or right?
StylexSai i always put the pivots on the bottom corner, on a grid point, that way when you duplicate things its easier to snap them end to end, or rotate them like a hinge/door. Works well for fences where are duplicating and rotating. Pivot in the centre means you gotta move, rotate and then usually move it again to align meshes. Rotating from a corner fixes that ;) right or left doesnt matter but keep it consistent throughout the kit
Hey, the terrain, wood...textures, do you do them yourself or do you pick them from a library? how do you usually face that amount of work that is doing all the tileable textures by yourself in like designer? Great videos btw
ranchera the ground textures were made in quixel mixer by combining some megascans textures, the wood was done in substance painter with a couple smart materials and my tree bark was sculpted in zbrush haha. So i go about it many different ways. If i can use a library or asset pack to get a head start on something its usually a good idea, spending 20-30 bucks to even save a few hours of work is well worth it, especially when you are doing freelance/professional work
Yea they have some awesome textures on there. For this challenge we were not allowed to use megascans at all, so had to make this from scratch, but i definitely use megascans on projects these days
@@PolygonAcademy can u show one tutorial on how to use roof tiles texture tilling on plane mesh in ue4 , i mess up texel density always while exporting from maya wht texel density should i set
Hey Tim, love the series! Just a quick question, I noticed that on your wood trims there were no bevels on the edges. Is that what you normally do? Does that not create problems when baking? I usually bevel every edges to avoid that low-poly looking and baking problems. What's your take on it?
Andrew Chang i just had them on different smoothing groups with a uv seam on each edge, bakes perfectly :) that way there are no wierd gradients in the normal map where its trying to compensate for the bevels/ averaged bormals and i could use the texture as a trim sheet even on flat geo i have elsewhere
I notice that you've got a vertical trim between each section of the building wall. Is that pretty much a standard, or could you break sections on a flat plane, without the covering geo? I'm in the process of breaking wall sections on a flat plane and am hoping with higher quality light bakes as I get further into the project that the weird light artifacts and bleeding/lightmap baking problems will go away? You have any tricks/tips for that? ('don't do it' is an acceptable answer, haha)
Andrew Lund III yea you could have it flat for sure, if you set static lighting scale to like 0.1 in the world settings it helps with weird seams, but generally its better to have flat walls be single pieces of geo to avoid lightmap seams,
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks, man! Yeah, little bit of a planning error for me there... whoops. Thanks for the tip, and I'm going to 're-modularize' a few things on this scene per your advice. You the man! Keep attacking life like this. Its inspiring :)
Hey! I don't really quite understand how you made the materials. Were they seamless materials or were they applied specifically to the UV Unwrap of each mesh? And also, did you use those wooden meshes together with the wall mesh, and then grouped together before exporting for UE4 or what was the process? I'm still very new to this whole process and don't quite understand the workflow to efficiently making meshes with so many materials. (Currently I'm having unique materials made for each mesh's specific uv unwrap which takes up a tonne of time and doesn't always necessarily line up properly) Anyway, this is a really helpful tutorial series! Thanks for sharing this with us! :)
yea the moss and plaster were tiling (seamless textures) and then the wood pieces were a tiling trim sheet that tiles seamlessly horizontally. each piece had 2-3 material IDs on the mesh, for each different material. If you havent seen my trim sheets tutorial series, check that out next it will help you understand a lot :) and save you a TON of time in future i hope!
Thank you so much for the insights! How much time did it take you to finish the whole scene, from beginning to end? I often feel anxious about my speed in creating 3d environments and would love to have a rough orientation/comparison.
If you are starting out dont focus on time/speed, focus on matching industry quality work. Speed just comes with time, i talk about that in my video on failure on the channel :)
Hello! I am still a novice, but I have tried to replicate the dimensions of my apartment in UE4. Using the FirsPersonBP to roam around I realized right away that real world dimensions of walls and doors do not work - too small. Should I use a multiplier?
yea with fps views you have to take the cameras FOV into account, things tend to feel smaller. I would say 1.2x-1.5x is a good ballpark, thats why blocking it in super rough in greybox is a good start because you can figure out what feels good before advancing the art :)
Great tutorial! Is the Unreal moss shader that projects onto upward facing polygons available for download? Perhaps with different texture layers for snow, sand, rainwater?
It was a beta version on my friends shader, he released it for sale i think with a ton of other features that make it extremely useful ruclips.net/video/iihzTSlhNLc/видео.html
Is it better to use separated bricks instead of substance designer texture with height? I mean you could take just plane and assign a cool material with height. What do you think about this?
Денис Иваненко most of the time i would use a tiling texture from designer but i do that all day at work so i want to sculpt and build more with geometry for this project. Height/displacement is also more technically expensive than normal polygons in most cases too. There isnt really a “better” workflow, just different ones based on your technical limitations and time ;) just demonstrate you can do both in your portfolio and you will be good!
@@PolygonAcademy hey man quick follow up question, is the knowledge of substabce designer a big must to land a job? im mostly a character artist but i wanna dip into environments but substance designer goes way over my head for some reason
I would say it comes in handy, but for character art painter is way more important. If you want to get a job fast, focus on either characters or environment, and get really good at one of them. Trying to do both will make you a jack of all trades, master or none. Try both, see which you enjoy more and then double down on one skill set.
@@PolygonAcademy thanks for the quick reply i was talking about substance designer in the context of environments, on that note do you happen to have a gumroad with maybe tutorials on it? really like the way you do your breakdowns keep up the great work!
Hi Thank you very much for this really usefull tutorials!! Could I ask you a question?: If you use shapes of 4m x 4m then how could you achieve 10.24 texel density (1024px / m2) this works in a 2m x 2m plane with a 2k texture but in case of chunks of 4m, what´s the best to do for? (overlap or use different udims maybe? are you using another TD or 4K textures? Thank you very very much in advance!
You would rely on tiling that 2k texture 2x on a 4m piece, 4k textures for environment work are still pretty rare, so tile the 2k texture and also break up large areas with vertex blending in other materials to help hide the tiling
@@PolygonAcademy Oh that's it! thank you very much! Is Vertex Paint expensive or we can use it freely (I guess only where it's necessary)? You inspire me and helped me a lot. Regards from Argentina.
@@gabocavallaro yea its pretty cheap, you can use it on assets quite a lot, if you are doing variations on every instance of an object it can get expensive, but if you put it into the base asset itself it is extremely cheap.
Rosan karel i did that mainly to not have my house be super wide, i tried with a 4mx4m corner at first and the building was really wide when assembled, i generallly like corner pieces to be smaller, i find it more useable in most cases. But its just personal preference
Hey Dude, a little off top question. Are you a Mix fighter or some sort of wrestler? Your ears are wrecked and I only know one reason for that =) And yh, good tutorials and neat explanation of game assets production! Keep it up!
Конструктор hahah thats from fighting with my brother as a kid and him hitting me with a ps1 controller in the ear 😂 i wish i was tough enough for mma haha. Thanks for the feedback!
I am a little confused. For the building wall pieces, do you keep all of them in same UV set. Or do they all have separate UV sets for each. Really helpful tutorial.
the buildings use tiling textures so the same 2-3 materials for each piece, each piece I just applied the material and uv'ed it so it looks ok. they dont have unique 0-1 unwraps, they are using tiling texture mapping.
Great video! I have a question, though: I found it a little unclear whether or not this would be a viable workflow for a so called "game-game". Do game studios start out with loads of individual pieces and end up replacing them for better performance, or is this never part of the workflow at all? How much does it depend on the scale of the game? Does it mostly affect performance, or development time to do it this way?
BT Darmstad hey thanks for watching. Most games i have worked on keep everything in modular pieces like this. Sometimes if there is extreme optimization needed, some assets might get combined, but that is usually a last resort. It depends on the game and engine, but like i i said, 99% of the games i have worked on keep it multiple meshes like this, it makes changing things and adding quick variation a lot easier
Creating each individual brick and shingle for walls and roofs sounds like it's going to bloat your blend files? Is this really a good way to make assets for a game?? Also you are using unique trim sheets just for the shingles ,bricks etc????
Yes this is a pretty common method, look at games like dark souls or god of war, they use a lot more geometry for things like bricks and chunky rock walls, it looks better than a flat tiling texture or trim sheet. With nanite, now on our current production we are using a TON of geo for everything, with displaced surfaces and high poly props etc. but yea max/blender files get quite large, but thats a pretty common thing on modern productions now
@@PolygonAcademy ok. I guess I'll follow your lead and try do my 3d for my game like yours. Just wild. I have been taught to try and use as little vertexes as possible. So this comes as a completely new frontier for me
@@sudanemamimikiki1527 yea geometry used to be more of an issue on ps3 era games where it was more strict for memory count. But nowdays geo is one of the cheapest things. Better for memory to use more geo than to put 4k textures on everything. Nanite also compresses geo data incredibly well to small on disk sizes
@@PolygonAcademy oh boy I was planning on using 4k textures on everything... Man I'm supposed to graduate from my uni next year fand I still feel like I should be in here for a few more years...
Great Series! Noob question (2-years late) though. Why modular components for the house? Why not model the whole building at once and place it in the scene? Thanks!
usually for games you need to create a variety of buildings and houses out of a kit to have different shapes and sizes for gameplay or to make the place feel like its larger/more detailed than it actually is. modeling each building uniquely is super time consuming and limiting, when you use a modular kit you can create a ton of variations very quickly and fill in a scene. in this case I could have done it uniquebut i might go back to this scene or use the assets in another project where i need different setups, so this future proofs the work a bit more :) I tend to just stick to the workflows i use for my job in the studio as it is second nature now and keeps me in a production mindset haha.
@@PolygonAcademy Damn! I di not expect such a quick reply! Thanks a lot, that really helps! I'm an ArchViz guy but with the Unreal 5 demo out now I wanna start doing more environment art - perhaps to add my visualisations in to. So it really helps to know how to optimise the process! Thanks a lot! Love your content!!
A trim sheet is usually a collection of strips of detail that tiles horizontally, this is a great example from god of war: www.artstation.com/artwork/XZ2L0
I would sculpt 1-2 large rocks you can place ontop of a large terrain mesh you create in unreal. You can scale/rotate the rocks to hide repetition and it should look good :) there are lots of good rock sculpting tutorials on youtube. This is how we did large natural scenes when i was working on farcry 4
I tried to make a modular urban night scene and bake lights (there's a lot of neons) to reduce draw calls, but oh boy, seams appear everywhere (and i'm using a proper lightmap for each asset). The only way to keep it consisten visually is by using real time but draw calls are over 3K and that's insane. Anyone knows a way to keep draw calls low while using real time lighting? Because I wonder how open worlds and cities are made, these kind of scenarios demand you yo use real time lighting. damn, I can't wait to get my nanites and stuff...
3D Fer are you using material instances for all your materials? That helps, aldo for open world, usually there is an aggressive streaming setup and heavy use of cull volumes to only load objects in a small radius around the player. Then you tune the max draw distance on your lights so they only appear when on screen and noticeable. Also, try and use as few material ID’s on meshes as possible, 1-3 is fine but sometimes people have 5-10 materials on all their modular kit pieces and that blows up your drawcalls super fast
Just asking because I am a beginner: Isn’t it worse to have multiple stones for a single wall instead of one geometry with one material, map etc..? Thank you for your great tips! :)
it depends on the scene, engine and overall look you want. A texture map would probably be cheaper, but I wanted that chunky god of war and dark souls look where they use a lot of actual geometry in their scenes. because the scene is fairly small and linear you could get away with having all the bricks done with geo, but if this was an open world game it would almost definitely be a texture map instead. it just depends on the style of game you are working on and your technical limits.
is there any tutorials how to manage unreal scenes in the right way. I mean how to avoid rebuilding the scene after reimport some of the models especially if they have different count of sub elements? how to avoid memory leaks? for example in 3ds max there is instance cheker to save memory and time
well static meshes are treated as instanced meshes by the editor by default so that saves memory and performance, but any time you change something and re-import chances are you are going to have to re-bake lighting, but you can set it up to bake at night while you sleep, having a few objects with non baked lighting shouldnt stop you from general world building and level design tasks :) also keeping the pivots of objects the same is super important once they are placed in the scene, otherwise when you re-import things will move based off the new pivot location. there are other things but that starts to get into the tech artist side of things, I just focus on making nice art haha.
Great Video again Currently building a modular kit , based on a location from a film , That last bit where you say don't get lost in the Small details that nobody will notice and think Of the bigger picture is great advice , I had started to think I had a problem as I keep doing this like a crazy perfectionist and trying to achieve cm sale accuracy on everything instead om moving forwards with the project. So is this a common thing that happens or is it just me being crazy.
AlphaWoIF dude 11 years in and i still fall into that trap haha. You just learn to catch yourself and refocus in what matter quicker. But sometimes doing needless details can be fun and creatively satisfying in personal work, but paid/professional work you are just adding man hours/overtime.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks , This made me feel better that its not just me. It feels like an internal battle between my logic and my drive for perfection.
Hemant Lonkar it really depends on your time/budget. For the challenge i know i have an exact deadline of dec3 and started oct 15, so i will be putting ad much time into it as i can spare. On other projects like farcry 4 i worked on a 1KMx1Km square area of the map for almost a year. I have seen characters take 2 weeks and others take 6 months, depends on the complexity of the design. I would just focus on getting to high quality end results, you will get faster over time, but quality is super important, especially for portfolio work 👍
Thank you, really helpful video! I was wondering, when you finish your group of meshes (for example the brickwall), how do you export it? Do you merge all the elements in one? Also, do you make the uvs for the lightmaps or do you use the automatic one of ue4?
I export the modular pieces and assembled the scene in unreal, for example a 2m or 4m wall section is one object. I just export as fbx and import it into unreal. same for the pieces that make up the house etc. For this scene I mostly used the auto generated lightmap uvs, unreal does a pretty good job of that.
nothing too crazy, i-7 3.4ghz, 16gb ram, nvidia 1060gtx, no SSD just a normal 2tb hdd. Its like a 6 year old pc and I updated the graphics card a couple years ago. I need to get a new one soon haha.
for me he is Mr. Epic, like the Rock just in 3D :D ! is it possible to ask what kind of Paintbrush you use to make his unique strokes on the Brickstones at 5:53 ? this is really awesome. I started with zBrush 2 weeks ago and dont took look deep at the brushes, would really nice if you can help me this out, gg Mate stay Gold
Marcus Ramsey haha i think cgma is actually underpriced based on the results i have seen the students get, but yea my premium courses will be in the 200-500 range depending on the content and length :) with beginner and advanced courses/subjects. Something for everyone i hope, just gotta find the actual time to make them 😂
@@PolygonAcademy Haha you're probably right I just don't have like 5k to drop, unfortunately. Awesome man! you're a great teacher and I would buy it! I'm sure other people would too. A lot of people making $$ from courses right now. Thanks for the awesome free content in the meantime!
Marcus Ramsey thanks dude, that support really gives me confidence for the future of this project :) and spoiler alert: the free content is ALWAYS gonna be the backbone of my content ;) 90% free 10% premium for the people who are super serious and wanna go deep. Thats the business model im planning
I love you. You seriously helped me understand what to pay attention to, and what not :) Personally i am struggling with making too many assets in white boxing and i always feel that all of them are needed.... Then i end up with 30 pieces... What is normally a decent number of models to create a modular environment of this scale? Also could you explain a bit better your thought process on a trim sheet?There is information about how to make it, but there is no information on the thought process, on how to design your trim sheet.
Zaroukos Maf awesome! Glad it helped. The number is hard to figure out, i usually use my concept or reference to try and break down how many pieces i need based on walls, window, door pieces etc. I just try to get away with making as few pieces as possible but still hitting the quality and feel of the concept or reference. Ill go in depth on trims soon :)
You're a natural teacher, great videos man. Can't wait to purchase the full environment workflow tutorial I think you mentioned you were working on in one of your more recent videos. Thanks, and can't wait for more!
This is great stuff, super helpful for learning a modular workflow. Just a quick question... do you do your graybox on the modular grid as well? So that when you make your kit you can re-import the meshes and everything snaps together? Or do you not bother with the grid during the graybox phase and then when you move on to the kit you factor that in?
Monica Benya you could definitely do that, for professional work after i have done a first pass and have something compositionally i like i will go back and gridify things with proxy models that work on the grid, but during thr first pass i am scaling and smashing objects together, starting 100 percent grid based can limit your composition initially. If there is gameplay involved and actual level design, i stick more to the grid right off the bat.
polycount is not really too much of an issue, especially with a good set of LODs, complex shaders, lights and drawcalls are the performance killers for sure.
The 1llus1on1st 1 saw your reply on the other video, hes going to release the shader in a pack for sale at some point. This video also shows you how to make a good moss shader :) ruclips.net/video/HDluA1f5gzw/видео.html
Hey, great video but I got 1 question. I want to create a wall out of 5 wooden planks that I copy and paste over and over on this wall. Every of this 5 wooden planks got his own high poly version, texture and Uv map. My problem is that when I merge them to 1 object to bring them into Unreal I lose the Uv maps and then also the texture maps. So how can I bring this wood wall that is made out of 5 different wooden planks with 5 different textures and Uv maps in one object to Unreal without losing my Uvs, textures for them?
you would need to set the material ID's of each plank to be different in your 3d program after you combine them, and in unreal you should have 5 material slots that you can plug in 5 different materials you create, one for each plank with its own textures and uvs. this is super expensive though as it dramatically will increase your drawcalls for this object. most objects should only have 1-2 material IDs in most cases. I would just put all the planks onto one big 2k or 4k texture, like attach them all, spread out the uvs for all 5 planks and then bake them all down onto one material and assemble them after baking.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks a lot for your answer! Do you know any tutorial on how to bake them all down to one material? The only video I found is this " ruclips.net/video/abZ1EnijrSs/видео.html " But if thats what you mean Im not sure how to load it to Unreal after. Sorry that I'm bothering you again
@@SxitGtwitch dont know of any tutorial but you would just attatch all the lowpoly together before baking, layout the uvs in the 0-1 space for all 5 planks, and then bake from the highpoly to that single lowpoly mesh, then you can detach them again after, and use the individual meshes however you like to build walls/windows etc. Each plank would only take up a portion of the actual texture space and they would all use the same material.
I'm really loving this series, thank you for taking the time to make it! I was wondering, for UE4s LODs, did you have to manually set anything up in unreal to get it to work or does Unreal do that by default already? Cheers!
Barbara K i think you have to set it manually in the static mesh options after you import it. If you scroll down there is an lod section where you can chose the amount of lods and how much to reduce etc.
Would be cool if you could make a video similar to the wood one on how to creatw nice looking bricks. Your videos are really nice, love to watch them at night while relaxing
Kainkun yea, ill go into it deeper in my next video i think :) basically just textured the little geo kits in substance painter and then duplicated the already textured objects around in max
This video helped me alot to think differently while building the moduls for my environment .you mentioned that you are a self-learner so is there any books you recommend me to read about level design and environment art ?.Really i'm so hungry to watch more videos from you .
Mostafa Samir thanks man, that means a lot :) i dont know any books, i would just look on youtube for tutorials so you can actually see peoples process.when i was learning art i bought a few gnomon dvds and other tutorial videos, they were a great investment!
Still watching this more than a year later. It all clicks even more now that I got my first junior job as an environment artist. Just listening to this while working away haha. Hope all is well with you Tim, thanks again for these! Peace.
cheers! happy to hear you come back to it, and congrats on the jr position! thats awesome. things are going well thanks!
That's so cool. Congrats! I've got a question. I've watched a lot of videos on exterior environment/level design, but how do you start with an interior location? I know for a dungeon the modular approach makes sense but what about buildings?
so did u keep the job career path still? im trying to break into this industry
I'm a little late to the party but I wanted to say thanks for posting these videos. As someone who's trying to learn environment art. Being able to see these breakdowns and hear about what's going through your head when you create modular environments like these is a huge help for me! :D
no problem! so happy when I see comments like this :D
When your whooping 6 hours a week of lectures doesn’t teach you stuff so you happen to find amazing channels such as this, keep it coming! ^-^
Cheers! Plenty more to come :)
This was an awesome video! I make assets this same way. One big perk to doing larger modular pieces as well is that it will equate to fewer draw calls, and especially on Switch/Mobile games that's really important.
I just saw your work on artstation yesterday and I loved it. I came across the videos linked in the feudal japan piece and I've watched all of them! Really love how you spoke clearly, directly, yet naturally about everything, it was almost like you were my friend Devon from my university and you were helping me with homework. My favorite part was when showed the scene in unreal with the wall going through the wall and saying 'it's OK for this to happen' I'm always scared cause when I'm in school doing 3D environments my teachers point out my waste of geometry! Looking forward to more of your videos in the future and if you'd be down for doing a twitch live stream one day that would be great too! :D
alex achim awesome! Thanks for the love :) yea a little waste in polys vs spending time fixing something that isnt effecting performance is fine. Time investment almost always dictates my actions ;) i might do fb live or stream on here when i get some free time haha
@@PolygonAcademy I was rewatching your video and I was thinking to myself at 5:00 when you talked about all the modular assets, especially the smaller ones, how do you handle UVing them? Like when you are working on AAA games, do you unwrap them and put a bunch of meshes UVs on a single UV sheet? I imagine the large pieces like walls/doors etc would have an entire UV sheet to itself.
For a lot of things i use tiling textures and dont uniquely unwrap things in a 0-1 layout, tiling textures and trims make up a lot of environment work, for this poject i am doing more unique unwraps to shake it up and try other workflows, but for most games, tiling textures and trims will be a big part of environment work. Ill touch on that in the textures/materials vlog coming soon :) but if you want to know more asap, just search for vids on tiling textures and trim sheets 👍
I need to sleep for work tomorrow but I can't stop watching these great tutorials!
tmektmek haha thanks! Thats the best kind of compliment :) appreciate the love!
i feel silly having written a question in the previous video asking about secondary pieces and I got the answer in this video. thank you for sharing the tips and knowledge.
akib ahmed no problem bud, glad you are enjoying the series!
This is the best video I have ever seen!
Like... man, I've created a lot of sets for UE4, mostly modular environments, all of those full of little details. Thanks to this video I was able to re-package all the assets and remove like... 80% of the content! Thank you"
Dominik Pavlíček awesome! Thats great to hear, thanks so much for the feedback :)
Seriously Tim these step by step vids are awesome!! Keep up the great work and I'm also following everything on Artstation so can't wait to see how this turns out :D
Guillermo Sánchez thanks bud!
Hello dear Tim,
I am learning very awesome things from your tutorials. Thanks for sharing this with us. Please breakdown another environment. I am thirsty about your new tutorials.
You deserve way more subs, this was a great break down. Looking forward to more of your stuff.
thanks M Bomb :) that means a lot to me! got a zbrush wood sculpting tutorial that will go live in a couple hours ;) check back soon
This is so useful, I wish it came out 2 years ago
Z Yord thanks :) more to come soon too
well it came out 2 years ago=)
Subscribed to your channel man.... Your content is awesome. Also watched the greybox part and was blown away by the simplicity and efficiency
Debmalya Mitra thanks! Appreciate the sub and taking the time to comment 👍
One more subscriber! I really like where you place your camera for your videos. It feels like I'm right next to you and looking at your computer. Great videos! Thx!
thanks! its a combo of a small apartment and also wanting to make it feel like me and you guys are just hanging out! I hate formal education and that power dynamic haha.
i love these series, I learned so much from just 2 vids :D please keep making them :D
cheers! thanks for watching, glad you enjoyed the series :D
buddy, thank you so much, you have no idea how much you simplified my life
Keep doing what you're doing, this is great, I've learned so much just in the last three videos. You've got a new sub!
will do :) thanks for the great feedback and I appreciate the sub :)
Hey! Really loving the videos.. being into this over 8 years now, modularity (specifically textures) have always stumbled me. In terms of textures and draw calls, would the walls, then Windows, then roof all be their own texture timetable of would you put them on an atlas? What's the best industry working practice for buildings with that? Can never find that any where. How in-depth you are in this series is incredible, I really love it! Thank you
For most modular kits you are going to want to use a combo of tiling textures and trim sheets. You can use an atlas but it makes your kit less reuseable and harder to quickly swap surface materials because the uvs are more specificly laid out instead of more generic tiling materials. I wouldnt worry too much about drawcalls for personal work, chances are unless you have 5+ material ids on each mesh you are fine ;)
I love this style Even because my project is entirely based on this
Thank you, Tim, for sharing your Knowledge with us, I'm learning a lot from your videos!
marwan Ammar you’re welcome bud
nice video....you could decrease amount of poly in your models because even with LOD there are too many poly...your workflow is very helpful, i work in blender there is a modifier called decimate what is does i basically reduce geometry without changing its shape im sure 3DS max have a modifier with same feature....should try it with your workflow and might be able to get more performance
yea its pretty high poly but for a scene like this its fine, the LODs do their job agressively, on those walls, once the camera is more than 3m away it cuts the polycount in half. I used similar polycounts to this to the environments we are building at work and similar models we had on farcry 4. 3ds max has a pro-optimize modifier, sounds like a version of the decimate modifier :)
Thank you for making this series, it has been really helpful. :)
cheers! glad you enjoyed it! thanks for watching
this was awesome!!, please, I'm really searching for a long long modular tutorial like this, but more longer with nice detail about how to create modular UV's or how to set up modules for anything, You could think about to create something like this tutorial but getting more depper about modular kits?
Irensay yea i will be making more tutorials on this subject soon, and eventually have a super in depth environment creation course that covers every single aspect in depth step by step. Just gotta find the time to make it 😂
@@PolygonAcademy really appreciated, is awesome that guys like you try teach us, this is awesome, thank you!
Thank you for making this video! So helpful and easy to follow!
you're welcome :D
underrated channel IMO
Quentin Arrius thank you :)
Hey Tim! First I'd like to say: Amazing videos! Invaluable output/input your putting together. Super enjoyable also. Thanks from the heart for the effort making all these! Instant sub and looking forward to watch all the rest!
I have a question which bothers me quite a while, maybe you have some general guideline or advice:
When planning for modular environments with big pieces: when is the actual moment where the piece gets too big and you won't be able to bake out a normal from a high poly anymore? Like lets say, I have a huge tree, maybe 15 meters high, and it should have about a certain texel density like lets say 512px/cm or 1024px per cm. But the texture would be huge and actually require a lot of res to get the enourmous size covered with enough density to carry the high res. Like 4k or multiple 4ks or so. Which obviously wouldn't be very efficient. That is, if you are able to cover a tree of that size in the first place, since it's unlikey when staying inside the 0-1 space , which is required for baking. I know such pieces commonly get scaled outside the 0-1 UV space and are textured with tiling textures in engine. Which makes perfect sense. But that wouldn't make it possiblee to bake a HP onto it for unique detail. So my question is: How and when do you decide that you can't use a high res sculpt for your assets anymore to bake them on a big sized object? And need to stick with tiling textures only? I assume working to go round about matching a certain consistent texel density across your assets is key to a succsesfull envirnoment. And I see that with large brick walls you can sculpt the individual bricks and group them together. However, for example, your wood pieces are rather long. How do you ensure they stay inside the 0-1 space ? Being non stretched or nearly non stretched and hit a certain texel desnsity? This always confuses me about environment design. As well as with the design of large Boss like characters. Because I think they do have a normalmap, too, right ? Mabye you could even do a video on this? Talking about texel density in general and maybe on the way cover this special topic or problematic? Would be a total blast! :D
Harry Sanders one option that lots of people use for trees or rocks is to bake out a unique 0-1 normal at like 2k on uv channel 2, and then also tile detail maps on channel 1 to get the overall resolution sharp. Most games dont use 4k maps at all, they are too memory intensive. Even god of war mostly used 1k maps for the most part.
Another option for like the boss character situation would be to use multiple maps and materials, like a 2k for the head and a 2k for the torso, and one for the legs etc. Also, thanks for the sub!
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks a lot for the answers! That both makes sense and clears the uncertainties I had up for me. Really helpful.
Great content! Thanks for your effort! Keep rocking!
Artem Mykhailov thanks artem! Finished editing this one at 4am last night so glad to know the effort was worth it 😂
Great videos! Thank you for doing this.
thanks Johan!
Awesome video!! man this is a great series and help me alot.
mustafa Hussein awesome! Glad to hear :)
Was just wondering if you would do a video on the texturing side of things ? Im having some difficulty on the best way to go about it and understanding trim sheets
LockeNess Motorsports new video on trim sheets is up on the channel! Should help you out :)
Hey your techniques are new and i found them very useful but can you do a video on vertex painting
yea, I will make one soon, I added the topic to my list :D
Another great video! I have a question. You said you put the pivot point all in the same place. Where exactly did you put it? The center, bottom, bottom left or right?
StylexSai i always put the pivots on the bottom corner, on a grid point, that way when you duplicate things its easier to snap them end to end, or rotate them like a hinge/door. Works well for fences where are duplicating and rotating. Pivot in the centre means you gotta move, rotate and then usually move it again to align meshes. Rotating from a corner fixes that ;) right or left doesnt matter but keep it consistent throughout the kit
Hey, the terrain, wood...textures, do you do them yourself or do you pick them from a library? how do you usually face that amount of work that is doing all the tileable textures by yourself in like designer? Great videos btw
ranchera the ground textures were made in quixel mixer by combining some megascans textures, the wood was done in substance painter with a couple smart materials and my tree bark was sculpted in zbrush haha. So i go about it many different ways. If i can use a library or asset pack to get a head start on something its usually a good idea, spending 20-30 bucks to even save a few hours of work is well worth it, especially when you are doing freelance/professional work
for me the Roof tiling texture from megascans works with just displacement map we can get the details better
Yea they have some awesome textures on there. For this challenge we were not allowed to use megascans at all, so had to make this from scratch, but i definitely use megascans on projects these days
@@PolygonAcademy can u show one tutorial on how to use roof tiles texture tilling on plane mesh in ue4 , i mess up texel density always while exporting from maya wht texel density should i set
bro, you are saving lives! thank you so much!
Please can you a tutorial on modular building. Your tutorials are extremely helpful thank you!
rly rly helpfull, keep going!!
thanks :) more to come soon, got some huge time saver tricks coming next video
I needed this video so bad 😂
TheAzurSky hell yea! Now go make some cool art 🔥🔥🔥
Amazing content! Cannot thank you enough for sharing.
You’re welcome, thanks for watching :)
Hey Tim, love the series! Just a quick question, I noticed that on your wood trims there were no bevels on the edges. Is that what you normally do? Does that not create problems when baking? I usually bevel every edges to avoid that low-poly looking and baking problems. What's your take on it?
Andrew Chang i just had them on different smoothing groups with a uv seam on each edge, bakes perfectly :) that way there are no wierd gradients in the normal map where its trying to compensate for the bevels/ averaged bormals and i could use the texture as a trim sheet even on flat geo i have elsewhere
@@PolygonAcademy Oh yeah, that totally makes sense! Thx for clearning that up for me :D
I notice that you've got a vertical trim between each section of the building wall. Is that pretty much a standard, or could you break sections on a flat plane, without the covering geo? I'm in the process of breaking wall sections on a flat plane and am hoping with higher quality light bakes as I get further into the project that the weird light artifacts and bleeding/lightmap baking problems will go away? You have any tricks/tips for that? ('don't do it' is an acceptable answer, haha)
Andrew Lund III yea you could have it flat for sure, if you set static lighting scale to like 0.1 in the world settings it helps with weird seams, but generally its better to have flat walls be single pieces of geo to avoid lightmap seams,
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks, man! Yeah, little bit of a planning error for me there... whoops. Thanks for the tip, and I'm going to 're-modularize' a few things on this scene per your advice. You the man! Keep attacking life like this. Its inspiring :)
Hey! I don't really quite understand how you made the materials. Were they seamless materials or were they applied specifically to the UV Unwrap of each mesh? And also, did you use those wooden meshes together with the wall mesh, and then grouped together before exporting for UE4 or what was the process? I'm still very new to this whole process and don't quite understand the workflow to efficiently making meshes with so many materials. (Currently I'm having unique materials made for each mesh's specific uv unwrap which takes up a tonne of time and doesn't always necessarily line up properly) Anyway, this is a really helpful tutorial series! Thanks for sharing this with us! :)
yea the moss and plaster were tiling (seamless textures) and then the wood pieces were a tiling trim sheet that tiles seamlessly horizontally. each piece had 2-3 material IDs on the mesh, for each different material. If you havent seen my trim sheets tutorial series, check that out next it will help you understand a lot :) and save you a TON of time in future i hope!
@@PolygonAcademy Thank you very much for the response! :) I'll definitely check out the series!
clean and clear
Hello! again sorry a quick question what brush did you use for the roof tiles? please :)
I think it was the trim smooth border brush for the edge detailing, similar to doing rocks :)
@@PolygonAcademy wow soo quick thank you so much I didnt kn own about that brush looks like a cuirous and usefulk brush thanks have a great day :D
Thank you so much for the insights! How much time did it take you to finish the whole scene, from beginning to end? I often feel anxious about my speed in creating 3d environments and would love to have a rough orientation/comparison.
Capo-flow-atom about 2 months, 3-4 nights a week at 3-6 hours a night probably. Probably around 150-200 hours.
If you are starting out dont focus on time/speed, focus on matching industry quality work. Speed just comes with time, i talk about that in my video on failure on the channel :)
Hello! I am still a novice, but I have tried to replicate the dimensions of my apartment in UE4. Using the FirsPersonBP to roam around I realized right away that real world dimensions of walls and doors do not work - too small. Should I use a multiplier?
yea with fps views you have to take the cameras FOV into account, things tend to feel smaller. I would say 1.2x-1.5x is a good ballpark, thats why blocking it in super rough in greybox is a good start because you can figure out what feels good before advancing the art :)
@@PolygonAcademy Great, ty so much for the tip! :)
@@RaduButarascu you're welcome :)
Great tutorial! Is the Unreal moss shader that projects onto upward facing polygons available for download? Perhaps with different texture layers for snow, sand, rainwater?
It was a beta version on my friends shader, he released it for sale i think with a ton of other features that make it extremely useful ruclips.net/video/iihzTSlhNLc/видео.html
Super curious about this Z Up shader, sounds like something I could use!
big overview of the shader in this video ruclips.net/video/AQkdPoBXqis/видео.html
@@PolygonAcademy thank you so much!!!
Is it better to use separated bricks instead of substance designer texture with height? I mean you could take just plane and assign a cool material with height. What do you think about this?
Денис Иваненко most of the time i would use a tiling texture from designer but i do that all day at work so i want to sculpt and build more with geometry for this project. Height/displacement is also more technically expensive than normal polygons in most cases too. There isnt really a “better” workflow, just different ones based on your technical limitations and time ;) just demonstrate you can do both in your portfolio and you will be good!
@@PolygonAcademy hey man quick follow up question, is the knowledge of substabce designer a big must to land a job? im mostly a character artist but i wanna dip into environments but substance designer goes way over my head for some reason
I would say it comes in handy, but for character art painter is way more important. If you want to get a job fast, focus on either characters or environment, and get really good at one of them. Trying to do both will make you a jack of all trades, master or none. Try both, see which you enjoy more and then double down on one skill set.
@@PolygonAcademy thanks for the quick reply i was talking about substance designer in the context of environments, on that note do you happen to have a gumroad with maybe tutorials on it? really like the way you do your breakdowns keep up the great work!
Syn Shenron migh do some in depth gumroad tuts in the future!
Hi Thank you very much for this really usefull tutorials!! Could I ask you a question?: If you use shapes of 4m x 4m then how could you achieve 10.24 texel density (1024px / m2) this works in a 2m x 2m plane with a 2k texture but in case of chunks of 4m, what´s the best to do for? (overlap or use different udims maybe? are you using another TD or 4K textures? Thank you very very much in advance!
You would rely on tiling that 2k texture 2x on a 4m piece, 4k textures for environment work are still pretty rare, so tile the 2k texture and also break up large areas with vertex blending in other materials to help hide the tiling
@@PolygonAcademy
Oh that's it! thank you very much! Is Vertex Paint expensive or we can use it freely (I guess only where it's necessary)? You inspire me and helped me a lot. Regards from Argentina.
@@gabocavallaro yea its pretty cheap, you can use it on assets quite a lot, if you are doing variations on every instance of an object it can get expensive, but if you put it into the base asset itself it is extremely cheap.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks a lot bro!! Gonna send you my practises so you can take a look^^ have a wonderfull day
great tutorial in such small videos...why did you created 2 by 2 for corner and 4 by 4 for wall ...
Rosan karel i did that mainly to not have my house be super wide, i tried with a 4mx4m corner at first and the building was really wide when assembled, i generallly like corner pieces to be smaller, i find it more useable in most cases. But its just personal preference
Hey Dude, a little off top question.
Are you a Mix fighter or some sort of wrestler? Your ears are wrecked and I only know one reason for that =)
And yh, good tutorials and neat explanation of game assets production! Keep it up!
Конструктор hahah thats from fighting with my brother as a kid and him hitting me with a ps1 controller in the ear 😂 i wish i was tough enough for mma haha. Thanks for the feedback!
I don't get how u did the Bend thing and the symmetri :/ It is not doing the same thing for me :(
you need to change the position of the bend and symmetry gizmos in the modifier, sometimes the rotation of it as well.
I am a little confused. For the building wall pieces, do you keep all of them in same UV set. Or do they all have separate UV sets for each.
Really helpful tutorial.
the buildings use tiling textures so the same 2-3 materials for each piece, each piece I just applied the material and uv'ed it so it looks ok. they dont have unique 0-1 unwraps, they are using tiling texture mapping.
Great video! I have a question, though: I found it a little unclear whether or not this would be a viable workflow for a so called "game-game". Do game studios start out with loads of individual pieces and end up replacing them for better performance, or is this never part of the workflow at all? How much does it depend on the scale of the game? Does it mostly affect performance, or development time to do it this way?
BT Darmstad hey thanks for watching. Most games i have worked on keep everything in modular pieces like this. Sometimes if there is extreme optimization needed, some assets might get combined, but that is usually a last resort. It depends on the game and engine, but like i i said, 99% of the games i have worked on keep it multiple meshes like this, it makes changing things and adding quick variation a lot easier
Creating each individual brick and shingle for walls and roofs sounds like it's going to bloat your blend files?
Is this really a good way to make assets for a game?? Also you are using unique trim sheets just for the shingles ,bricks etc????
Yes this is a pretty common method, look at games like dark souls or god of war, they use a lot more geometry for things like bricks and chunky rock walls, it looks better than a flat tiling texture or trim sheet. With nanite, now on our current production we are using a TON of geo for everything, with displaced surfaces and high poly props etc. but yea max/blender files get quite large, but thats a pretty common thing on modern productions now
@@PolygonAcademy ok. I guess I'll follow your lead and try do my 3d for my game like yours.
Just wild. I have been taught to try and use as little vertexes as possible. So this comes as a completely new frontier for me
@@sudanemamimikiki1527 yea geometry used to be more of an issue on ps3 era games where it was more strict for memory count. But nowdays geo is one of the cheapest things. Better for memory to use more geo than to put 4k textures on everything. Nanite also compresses geo data incredibly well to small on disk sizes
@@PolygonAcademy oh boy I was planning on using 4k textures on everything...
Man I'm supposed to graduate from my uni next year fand I still feel like I should be in here for a few more years...
Great Series! Noob question (2-years late) though. Why modular components for the house? Why not model the whole building at once and place it in the scene? Thanks!
usually for games you need to create a variety of buildings and houses out of a kit to have different shapes and sizes for gameplay or to make the place feel like its larger/more detailed than it actually is. modeling each building uniquely is super time consuming and limiting, when you use a modular kit you can create a ton of variations very quickly and fill in a scene.
in this case I could have done it uniquebut i might go back to this scene or use the assets in another project where i need different setups, so this future proofs the work a bit more :) I tend to just stick to the workflows i use for my job in the studio as it is second nature now and keeps me in a production mindset haha.
@@PolygonAcademy Damn! I di not expect such a quick reply! Thanks a lot, that really helps! I'm an ArchViz guy but with the Unreal 5 demo out now I wanna start doing more environment art - perhaps to add my visualisations in to. So it really helps to know how to optimise the process! Thanks a lot! Love your content!!
Hi Tim!, I have a question, trim sheet is the same thing that Atlas?... thanks for this videos, keep it up!
A trim sheet is usually a collection of strips of detail that tiles horizontally, this is a great example from god of war: www.artstation.com/artwork/XZ2L0
thank bro very good tutorial!
Anyone know how to do what he did with the corner piece of the roof but in blender?
Hi my name is Umar, I'm wondering that how I will create. Modular kit for rocky seen like mountain.
Thanks in advance 😊
I would sculpt 1-2 large rocks you can place ontop of a large terrain mesh you create in unreal. You can scale/rotate the rocks to hide repetition and it should look good :) there are lots of good rock sculpting tutorials on youtube. This is how we did large natural scenes when i was working on farcry 4
@@PolygonAcademy Thank you so much sir !
Can u make a tutorial about that topic ?
I tried to make a modular urban night scene and bake lights (there's a lot of neons) to reduce draw calls, but oh boy, seams appear everywhere (and i'm using a proper lightmap for each asset). The only way to keep it consisten visually is by using real time but draw calls are over 3K and that's insane.
Anyone knows a way to keep draw calls low while using real time lighting? Because I wonder how open worlds and cities are made, these kind of scenarios demand you yo use real time lighting.
damn, I can't wait to get my nanites and stuff...
3D Fer are you using material instances for all your materials? That helps, aldo for open world, usually there is an aggressive streaming setup and heavy use of cull volumes to only load objects in a small radius around the player. Then you tune the max draw distance on your lights so they only appear when on screen and noticeable. Also, try and use as few material ID’s on meshes as possible, 1-3 is fine but sometimes people have 5-10 materials on all their modular kit pieces and that blows up your drawcalls super fast
@@PolygonAcademy hmmmm i'll have to lower material slots then, some neon ads have around 5 or so, even tough my neon emit materials are instances.
Just asking because I am a beginner: Isn’t it worse to have multiple stones for a single wall instead of one geometry with one material, map etc..? Thank you for your great tips! :)
it depends on the scene, engine and overall look you want. A texture map would probably be cheaper, but I wanted that chunky god of war and dark souls look where they use a lot of actual geometry in their scenes.
because the scene is fairly small and linear you could get away with having all the bricks done with geo, but if this was an open world game it would almost definitely be a texture map instead. it just depends on the style of game you are working on and your technical limits.
Polygon Academy Thank you for your answer. That helped me a lot! :)
is there any tutorials how to manage unreal scenes in the right way. I mean how to avoid rebuilding the scene after reimport some of the models especially if they have different count of sub elements? how to avoid memory leaks? for example in 3ds max there is instance cheker to save memory and time
well static meshes are treated as instanced meshes by the editor by default so that saves memory and performance, but any time you change something and re-import chances are you are going to have to re-bake lighting, but you can set it up to bake at night while you sleep, having a few objects with non baked lighting shouldnt stop you from general world building and level design tasks :)
also keeping the pivots of objects the same is super important once they are placed in the scene, otherwise when you re-import things will move based off the new pivot location. there are other things but that starts to get into the tech artist side of things, I just focus on making nice art haha.
Great Video again Currently building a modular kit , based on a location from a film , That last bit where you say don't get lost in the Small details that nobody will notice and think Of the bigger picture is great advice , I had started to think I had a problem as I keep doing this like a crazy perfectionist and trying to achieve cm sale accuracy on everything instead om moving forwards with the project. So is this a common thing that happens or is it just me being crazy.
AlphaWoIF dude 11 years in and i still fall into that trap haha. You just learn to catch yourself and refocus in what matter quicker. But sometimes doing needless details can be fun and creatively satisfying in personal work, but paid/professional work you are just adding man hours/overtime.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks , This made me feel better that its not just me. It feels like an internal battle between my logic and my drive for perfection.
nice tutorial. keep up the good work.! auto subbed
PolyAsset 3D thanks! I appreciate it, really helps the channel!
He, I went to ask something to you that how much time to build the game Environment model and character is assumed
Hemant Lonkar it really depends on your time/budget. For the challenge i know i have an exact deadline of dec3 and started oct 15, so i will be putting ad much time into it as i can spare. On other projects like farcry 4 i worked on a 1KMx1Km square area of the map for almost a year. I have seen characters take 2 weeks and others take 6 months, depends on the complexity of the design. I would just focus on getting to high quality end results, you will get faster over time, but quality is super important, especially for portfolio work 👍
Thank you, really helpful video! I was wondering, when you finish your group of meshes (for example the brickwall), how do you export it? Do you merge all the elements in one? Also, do you make the uvs for the lightmaps or do you use the automatic one of ue4?
I export the modular pieces and assembled the scene in unreal, for example a 2m or 4m wall section is one object. I just export as fbx and import it into unreal. same for the pieces that make up the house etc. For this scene I mostly used the auto generated lightmap uvs, unreal does a pretty good job of that.
Your Pc specification please
nothing too crazy, i-7 3.4ghz, 16gb ram, nvidia 1060gtx, no SSD just a normal 2tb hdd. Its like a 6 year old pc and I updated the graphics card a couple years ago. I need to get a new one soon haha.
for me he is Mr. Epic, like the Rock just in 3D :D ! is it possible to ask what kind of Paintbrush you use to make his unique strokes on the Brickstones at 5:53 ? this is really awesome. I started with zBrush 2 weeks ago and dont took look deep at the brushes, would really nice if you can help me this out, gg Mate stay Gold
hey buddy need some advise as im trying to figure it out. are you free to chat if your available as i would like some insight into my situation
CGM is so expensive. you should make your own version and sell it for like $300 -$400 dollars. Id buy it.
Marcus Ramsey haha i think cgma is actually underpriced based on the results i have seen the students get, but yea my premium courses will be in the 200-500 range depending on the content and length :) with beginner and advanced courses/subjects. Something for everyone i hope, just gotta find the actual time to make them 😂
@@PolygonAcademy Haha you're probably right I just don't have like 5k to drop, unfortunately. Awesome man! you're a great teacher and I would buy it! I'm sure other people would too. A lot of people making $$ from courses right now. Thanks for the awesome free content in the meantime!
Marcus Ramsey thanks dude, that support really gives me confidence for the future of this project :) and spoiler alert: the free content is ALWAYS gonna be the backbone of my content ;) 90% free 10% premium for the people who are super serious and wanna go deep. Thats the business model im planning
You do MMA?
Haha no that ear is from fighting woth my brother as a kid and him smashing me upside the head with a ps1 controller 😂
@@PolygonAcademy Jeeze, hope you won whatever game you were playing lol
good shirt
hahah thanks, I love mass effect :)
@@PolygonAcademy I'm big fan too , missing Commander Shepard so much. :)
Would you get a barcode tattoo on the back of your head? That would be dope!
hahah maybe one day :P but it would be visible all the time haha so probably not
at 0:52 I think you mispronounced BLENDER! :D
I cant install art
like for the video y N7 t-short :)
He looks like the brazzers guy
HAHAHAH this isnt the first time I have heard that :P always makes me laugh.
@@PolygonAcademy 😂
in real life when your building a wall there are 2 -3 rows under the sand/ground.
No windows. That's cheating ;D
Music playing in the background lost you a subscriber did your teacher play music in the class ... Answer NO so why do you don't do it.
Aight Philip calm down
I wasn't aware that agent 47 making 3D Art.
....jokes apart your videos are very useful thanks a lot !
Quentin donnaint hahha hitman represent!
Hahahah !
@@everabyss You mean Johnny Sins?
Agent 47.... with N7??
I love you. You seriously helped me understand what to pay attention to, and what not :)
Personally i am struggling with making too many assets in white boxing and i always feel that all of them are needed.... Then i end up with 30 pieces... What is normally a decent number of models to create a modular environment of this scale?
Also could you explain a bit better your thought process on a trim sheet?There is information about how to make it, but there is no information on the thought process, on how to design your trim sheet.
Zaroukos Maf awesome! Glad it helped. The number is hard to figure out, i usually use my concept or reference to try and break down how many pieces i need based on walls, window, door pieces etc. I just try to get away with making as few pieces as possible but still hitting the quality and feel of the concept or reference. Ill go in depth on trims soon :)
You're a natural teacher, great videos man. Can't wait to purchase the full environment workflow tutorial I think you mentioned you were working on in one of your more recent videos. Thanks, and can't wait for more!
cheers! gonna get working on that eventually haha.
This is awesome to see. I really appreciate the knowledge you are sharing. I will be using a lot of your tips in my future projects.
Thomas Herrera awesome :) hope the tips save you some headaches in the future
Love your videos, could you do a video on detailing organic rock in zbrush? Thank you
This is great stuff, super helpful for learning a modular workflow. Just a quick question... do you do your graybox on the modular grid as well? So that when you make your kit you can re-import the meshes and everything snaps together? Or do you not bother with the grid during the graybox phase and then when you move on to the kit you factor that in?
Monica Benya you could definitely do that, for professional work after i have done a first pass and have something compositionally i like i will go back and gridify things with proxy models that work on the grid, but during thr first pass i am scaling and smashing objects together, starting 100 percent grid based can limit your composition initially. If there is gameplay involved and actual level design, i stick more to the grid right off the bat.
What about poly count? How much you worry about it when you are doing things like this? Complex shaders are worse right?
polycount is not really too much of an issue, especially with a good set of LODs, complex shaders, lights and drawcalls are the performance killers for sure.
That lighting on the rooftiles
The 1llus1on1st 1 saw your reply on the other video, hes going to release the shader in a pack for sale at some point. This video also shows you how to make a good moss shader :) ruclips.net/video/HDluA1f5gzw/видео.html
Hey, great video but I got 1 question. I want to create a wall out of 5 wooden planks that I copy and paste over and over on this wall. Every of this 5 wooden planks got his own high poly version, texture and Uv map. My problem is that when I merge them to 1 object to bring them into Unreal I lose the Uv maps and then also the texture maps. So how can I bring this wood wall that is made out of 5 different wooden planks with 5 different textures and Uv maps in one object to Unreal without losing my Uvs, textures for them?
you would need to set the material ID's of each plank to be different in your 3d program after you combine them, and in unreal you should have 5 material slots that you can plug in 5 different materials you create, one for each plank with its own textures and uvs. this is super expensive though as it dramatically will increase your drawcalls for this object. most objects should only have 1-2 material IDs in most cases. I would just put all the planks onto one big 2k or 4k texture, like attach them all, spread out the uvs for all 5 planks and then bake them all down onto one material and assemble them after baking.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks a lot for your answer! Do you know any tutorial on how to bake them all down to one material? The only video I found is this " ruclips.net/video/abZ1EnijrSs/видео.html " But if thats what you mean Im not sure how to load it to Unreal after.
Sorry that I'm bothering you again
@@SxitGtwitch dont know of any tutorial but you would just attatch all the lowpoly together before baking, layout the uvs in the 0-1 space for all 5 planks, and then bake from the highpoly to that single lowpoly mesh, then you can detach them again after, and use the individual meshes however you like to build walls/windows etc. Each plank would only take up a portion of the actual texture space and they would all use the same material.
@@PolygonAcademy You are a hero! Thank you so much. I hope that you will bring out a tutorial about creating a full environment one day
I'm really loving this series, thank you for taking the time to make it! I was wondering, for UE4s LODs, did you have to manually set anything up in unreal to get it to work or does Unreal do that by default already?
Cheers!
Barbara K i think you have to set it manually in the static mesh options after you import it. If you scroll down there is an lod section where you can chose the amount of lods and how much to reduce etc.
Would be cool if you could make a video similar to the wood one on how to creatw nice looking bricks. Your videos are really nice, love to watch them at night while relaxing
thanks! I will do a trim sheet sculpting tutorial soon with some brick style shapes in it :)
There is your art school education for which you will pay $40,000 or some ridiculous amount for free combine in a nutshell /cut the crap 8 videos.
thats high praise haha, thanks! glad you enjoyed it!
if you have to tweak your models in 3dsmax/maya you have to reimport and reassign all the shaders?
Nope, you just rightclick and choose reimport on the mesh in the content browser and it should be fine unless you changed the material ids in max.
Could you show and explain the unreal LOD system. How to use etc.?
viod vue good idea! Ill put it on the list :)
man, I absolutely love your videos. thanks for starting this channel!
thanks Alex, appreciate the feedback, glad you like the content!
great video where can I get the shader you use for the moss sounds super interesting if it is on sale I am willing to pay :)
My buddy lincoln made it, you can get it on his gumroad lincoln-hughes.gumroad.com/l/Qxqod
@@PolygonAcademy thanks!
Thanks! I was kind of confused on how did you texturing. Are you planning on going more in-depth for texturing?
Kainkun yea, ill go into it deeper in my next video i think :) basically just textured the little geo kits in substance painter and then duplicated the already textured objects around in max
@@PolygonAcademy Awesome. Looking forward to the rest of the series :)
This video helped me alot to think differently while building the moduls for my environment .you mentioned that you are a self-learner so is there any books you recommend me to read about level design and environment art ?.Really i'm so hungry to watch more videos from you .
Mostafa Samir thanks man, that means a lot :) i dont know any books, i would just look on youtube for tutorials so you can actually see peoples process.when i was learning art i bought a few gnomon dvds and other tutorial videos, they were a great investment!