Take a simple blockout object (in this example from the Game Asset Workflow: Complete Blender Guide) and have fun with it. See the world in a grain of sand!

Links:

Patreon

Game Asset Workflow: Complete Blender Guide on BlenderMarket (aka SuperHive)

On Gumroad

Blender

The post A Simple Block Blender Challenge appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

In this Blender tutorial we’ll…

• Show how to recreate a normal map matcap that works for geometry and bump textures
• Make a node group to use as a master control to switch between render passes
• Show how to combine 2 normal map textures together
• Show how to combine grayscale height textures with normal maps

Chapter List

00:00 – Overview
01:06 – Bump to matcap style
05:47 – Making it work from all angles
07:51 – Geometry + Textures = WOO!
09:09 – Node groups
10:41 – The global switch
14:01 – Mixing 2 normal map textures
17:20 – End

Links & Project Files

Download Blender 2.8

Using Blender Like Substance Designer

Procedural Clean Asphalt Texturing in Eevee Tutorial

Principled PBR Baker

Simple Bake on the Blender Market

Blending in Detail, Combining 2 Normal Maps Article

Combining 2 Normal Maps node group on Blendswap by radcapricorn

Baked Road Scene with Pavement Demo File

Textures.one Excellent PBR image texture resource

Let’s carry it on in the comments below if you think we should go into further details on anything!

The post Advanced Normal Map Creation Tips appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

In this Blender tutorial we’ll…

• Show how to bake to a plane
• Setup camera and materials to render like a bake
• Show a potential bug in the current Eevee renders
• Convert the bump node output to a normal map using nodes
• Save out the texture passes
• Show the renders working in Eevee and in Unreal Engine 4

Chapter List

00:00 – Overview
02:51 – Reason To Layer
05:11 – Baking To A Plane
05:24 – Baking 1 – Create the plane to bake to
05:32 – Baking 2 – Create the texture to bake to
06:30 – Baking 3 – Choose bake pass type
06:46 – Baking 4 – Select the geometry you want to bake to the plane
05:09 – Baking 5 – Hit Bake – or see 6 to optimize
07:00 – Baking 6 – Optimize
07:14 – Limitations Of Baking
08:04 – Setting Up The Camera
09:30 – Setting Up The Materials
10:22 – Frames and reroute nodes
12:15 – Continuing with the materials
13:54 – Rendering Final Setup
14:53 – Eevee rendering border issue (world material bleed)
16:33 – Continuing with rendering final setup
17:50 – Bump To Normal Map
20:08 – Saving The Textures
22:27 – Using The Textures on a single plane
24:58 – Using The Textures In UE4
27:23 – END

BAKE DOWNSIDE – Notice (above right) the loss of detail

BAKE UPSIDE – Notice above the speed at which the shader updates on the first plane. Simply put we get faster changes and faster renders. Meanwhile the 2nd plane that isn’t baked and still has huge amounts of node calculations takes close to 20 seconds to make the same change.

Links & Project Files

Download Blender 2.8

Procedural Clean Asphalt Texturing in Eevee Tutorial

Updated asphalt blend file with packed textures and single plane setup

Google Summer Of Code Procedural Texturing Project

Substance Designer

Great Blender Procedural Examples and Giveaways by Simon Thommes

Let’s carry it on in the comments below if you think we should go into further details on anything!

The post Using Blender Like Substance Designer appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

What is Texture Baking?

Essentially, we take everything – direct lighting, reflection, diffuse color, indirect illumination, ambient occlusion – and try to pack it into 1 texture.

Why Texture Baking?

1. Creative reasons

Imagine you have achieved some spectacular shader in Blender scene, that involve multiple texture layers, wicked mix using grunge map and so on. Now you want to transport it directly to Unity, while retaining the look.

Exporting just the diffuse texture won’t to the justice to this uber material of yours, because Unity shader system differs from what Blender has.

What we can do is to bake everything in 1 texture (all shadows, multiple layers of awesomeness, etc). Then it will be easier to replicate the look in Unity, by inserting this texture in some shader. Yep?

2. Performance

As we will have just one texture, in some cases we wouldn’t even need to calculate the lighting at all in the game engine. In our example, we have a grungy room with a window.

Surely, it demands some Global Illumination solution. Real-time Global Illumination is very heavy performance-wise. So we can just bake lighting (and every other texture) to one package.

3. Convenience

Sometimes, it’s just more convenient to have one texture. As a bonus, it takes less space on hard drive.

Baking Passes in Blender

Here you can see how various passes (Diffuse, Lighting, etc) sums up to produce the Complete map.

As a variant, we can just bake the Diffuse texture and leave light baking to Unity. Honestly, I would advice to do all lighting stuff in Unity, because it has very fast lightmapper. But it demands the Pro version, so plan accordingly.

And while I was writing the previous sentence, I realized one possible benefit of baking light in Blender – it cost you no money.

Bake Lighting in Blender and Unity: Some Differences

What are the differences between these baking options?

1. Blender can bake various passes, including Complete map. Unity bakes only lighting, but does it gracefully.

2. Unity lightmapper is, obviously, fully integrated into Unity engine. So you won’t need to export textures back and forth.

Just press button, wait for it to calculate, done.

Baking equals Faking?

To some degree – yeah. But don’t worry, because faking is fine. And very effective on mobiles, where we can’t afford to calculate expensive effects in real-time.

Game Level Texturing Introduction

1. Block out the model & Optimize it
2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake it
6. Enjoy the result and start making games (this is optional)

The post Game level texturing: Bake lighting in Blender and Unity (PART 5/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Texture Projection – Filling in the Blank Space

In the previous part, called Paint and project the texture, we projected our hand-painted texture from 2 cameras. And still we see some blank spaces.

Solutions:

1. We may repeat the projection process from 3-rd camera

2. Paint the rest of the texture by hand in Photoshop or Gimp

3. Or we can make a second UV map, quickly unwrap these blank spaces and clone from second UV map back. Sounds weird?

It’s easier than it sounds.

Clone from Second UV map

First, let’s create the 2nd UV set.

Then, select the polygons that you want to fill in, press U to Unwrap and select Smart UV Project or just Unwrap. After doing it, in the Image Editor move uv island to already textured space.

Lastly, you need to use the Clone from Second UV map tool to clone those freshly textured parts to our main UV set. Get it?

The Texture

Game Level Texturing

In this series of tutorials we talk about:

1. Block out the model & Optimize it
2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake it
6. Enjoy the result and start making games (this is optional)

The post Game Level Texturing: Clone from Second UV Map (PART 4.5/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Set Up Cameras And Render

First, let’s pick a camera angles from which we will project the texture. How to pick the best angles?

To have the best projection, we need to be perpendicular to the surface. At sharp angles projection will get stretched and that is not good. So, it’s fine to position camera directly in front of the biggest surface the wall.

Paint the texture in Gimp or Photoshop

The next step is to paint the texture. Go crazy with image editor and make the best matte painting you can. After doing it, drink some coffee.

Project the Texture in Blender

And only after coffee, return to Blender, go into Texture Painting mode and hit Apply Camera Image. Pick the texture that you’ve just painted.

Game Level Texturing

In this series of tutorials we talk about:

1. Block out the model & Optimize it
2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake texture

The post Game level texturing: Texture Projection (PART 4/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

The main steps

1. The base layer
2. Rust
3. Edge scratches
4. Some more scratches (can’t be enough)
5. Lighting

Lighting and Material perception

I can stress this enough: lighting plays an important role in creating convincing metallic shader. In creating every shader, to be honest, but material is especially sensitive. No way we can make bombastic heavy metal with poor lighting. Never ever.

Especially rim lighting – or back lighting – that’s important, use it.

Bonus metal shader tips:

Box mapping

We don’t want to unwrap high-poly models, don’t we? If so, use box-mapping as a texture projection mode (in material editor). And, of course, Generated or Object coordinates.

A dull texture can be a good texture

As we are going to project our textures from different sides of the ‘box’, we need a tileable textures. For that reason, let’s keep away from fancy stuff, because it will make our tiling pattern very apparent. The interesting parts, like scratches, will be added as a material layer. So don’t worry about it being dull for now.

Metal and Fresnel?

Technically, applying fresnel falloff to metal material isn’t physically correct. But who cares? Fresnel reflections get stronger at sharp angles, so it will enhance the rim light effect near the edges and reveal the shape better. Go for it.

Few more notes:

Written tutorial with all steps covered in detail can be found in 3dWorld magazine.

Built upon the source model of the Drill by Frank the Smith (CC-0). You can download it from Blendswap. Thanks, Frank!

The post How to Make Metal Material in Blender? appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

What is Texture Atlas and why we need it?

Let’s imagine we have 10 objects and each of them has its own UV map and texture. While it is okay in many cases, when you’re going to export it into the game engine, 10 object would mean 10 drawcalls. That’s not good.

To reduce the drawcalls to 1 we need to combine our 10 UV maps into 1 big UV map. Using Texture Atlas add-on for Blender, we can automatically do this tedious task.

Another reason to have 1 texture is that we can paint over all objects at once. Very convenient.

What exactly Texture Atlas add-on for Blender does?

1. Joins all selected objects

2. Unwraps into 1 UV map (there are a few methods available, including manual unwrap)

3. Separates the parts when done

This is the video #3 from the set of quick tutorials for Blender and Unity, dedicated to

Game Level Texturing 

1. Block out the model & Optimize it

2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake texture

The post Game level texturing: Texture Atlas (PART 3/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Game Level Modelling in Blender

Start from some basic model of a grungy environment. Head to Blendswap.com and search for Hallway.

After importing it to Blender, start cleaning the model from unnecessary details. Keep it as simple as possible and leave only the shapes which really contribute to the look.

Retopology in Blender

1. Delete unnecessary edge loops.

In many cases we need much less polygons, than we think, to define the shape of the model. So, select some edge loops by hitting ALT+ LEFT CLICK then press X and Delete Edge Loops.

2. Rebuild objects

In some cases (like this model) it’s a lot easier to rebuild object from scratch, than to retopologize it. You know, just create a new one.

Using that two simple techniques we can lower the vertex count dramatically – from 13000 vertices to 2800! If I wasn’t so lazy, the number could be even more shocking.

Game Level Texturing

1. Block out the model & Optimize it
2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake it
6. Enjoy the result and start making games (this is optional)

The post Game level texturing: Modelling and Retopology in Blender (PART 2/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Discover how to texture the whole scene AS ONE MODEL using what can be called ‘megatexture’ approach. One model, 1 big texture atlas plus your creativity – and that’s all!

Game Level Texturing: What is it about?

Through the set of 5 tutorials, we’ll implement megatexture style texturing to our game level.

Texturing the whole section of the game level in one go is not very common texturing technique. In many cases, modular approach has big advantage – we can reuse and recombine stuff. Also, maintaining individual assets is somewhat more clean way of doing things.

Benefits of ‘Megatexture’ approach

But, texturing the big environment as 1 model has its own pros.

1. Artistic freedom

Using this technique, we can paint over the surface of 3d model as if it was 2d. In fact, we’ll use the image editor to paint texture – and then project it back onto 3d geometry. In another words, that is paint-what-you-want type of thing.

2. Realistic and Creative effects

The problem of modular approach to producing game assets is that you will have similar objects in your scene. And there is no easy way of texturing the contact surface between 2 objects. Imagine metal barrel standing on the wet ground.

The place where the bottom of the barrel meats the ground should be wet and dirty.

Of course, all this problems can be solved in any workflow, but when painting the whole scene in one go, we solve it fast and gracefully.

3. Performance on mobiles

Possible performance gain in game engines, as everything will be baked to 1 texture (maybe even 1 model). On mobile devices, drawcalls are a big concern, so having 1 drawcall in the scene is just that good.

4. Nerd achievement

John Carmack from id Software used megatexture. You use megatexture. Nerd achievement unlocked.

Contents

In these tutorial series we’ll discover how to:

1. Block out the Model & Optimize it

2. Make a Texture Atlas

3. Paint and Project the Texture

4. Clone Details from 2-nd UV Map

5. Bake lighting

6. Enjoy the result and start making games (this is optional)

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