06 High-Poly Battery & Switch

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Current Gen 3D Game Prop Production

Michigan State University

Course 3 of 4 in the Art for Games Specialization

In this course you will learn to create a photo-real game prop using modern game art production techniques. You will gather reference, generate a base model, create a high polygon model, bake details onto a low poly model, and then texture and present a final portfolio piece. This course is aimed at students who have some knowledge in 3d and game art and would like to learn more advanced techniques employed in the creation of modern game assets. We will be using Maya, Zbrush, Marmoset, and Substance Painter extensively throughout the course. When you are finished you will have your own model based of of a real-world prop suitable for use in modern game engines.

From the lesson

Week 3: High-Poly Model

In this module you will take the low poly block in and generate a high polygon mesh that is accurate to the real world model as possible. We will be using a combination of sub division modeling and . The sky is the limit with poly counts, this model will never be UV unwrapped, it will just be used to generate texture maps for the game-ready version.

06 High-Poly Battery & Switch14:13

07 High-Poly Body Cap12:13

08 High-Poly Prepping the Body12:12

09 High-Poly Body10:20

10 High-Poly Floaters17:50

Taught By

Andrew Dennis
Professor of Practice

Transcript

In this video, I'll introduce you to methods we can use

inside of ZBrush to create

high polygon versions of the battery.

So now I'm moving on to the battery pack and the switch.

These are features that I could model out

using the regular SubD method I've shown already,

but I want to show you a different way

of getting these features.

The first thing I do is I noticed that

my switch needs to be a little wider at the top.

It needs that little nub cut into it.

Especially with what I'm about to do,

I need a lot more edges to all of my curves,

and I need to fill all the holes to make

this a completely full object.

I'm going to start by taking

these edges and using

my Connect tool to give me two segments.

Take that face and then I can extrude that in,

and get rid of the extra faces on the side.

Now I can fill this hole and the one on the other side,

and I also need a taper

that kind of comes into the top of this switch,

that I didn't model in before but looking closer,

I can see that it needs.

So I use my multi-cut to make these edges.

Making a couple adjustments to

the overall slope of the switch itself.

Let's take these faces on the sides.

Use my pivot tool to set my rotation point further back,

which lets me set the slope

down and do the same thing on the other side.

Great. It is starting to line up a lot

better with what I see in my reference.

I'm going to bring this into ZBrush

using DynaMesh polish method.

But in order to get that to work,

before it comes in,

I really need to take all of these curves

and add a lot more definition to them.

So that means, these ones on the side need to go as well,

all these rounded edges.

If I leave it too low,

I'm going to get weird striation

in it and it won't really work.

So like I said, before it goes in,

I just want to make sure that I'm adding a lot of

definition to any of these curving edges.

Next thing I want to do is

kind of the same thing for the battery pack.

I need to fill all these holes

and I'm going to get rid of some of

these extra edges that I

was using to help define where the switch would go.

Because instead, I'm going to model a lot of

these features inside of ZBrush directly.

Let's go into my UV Editing window.

I'm going to make a quick temporary UV

for this whole object.

This isn't going to be my long-term permanent one.

This is just a temporary UV

that'll help me organize where I

want sharp and soft edges inside of ZBrush,

to fill this hole as well and make

sure that anywhere that I want a sharp edge,

I have a UV seam.

I'm going to lay them all out.

Like I said, the actual ladder

itself doesn't really matter,

it's just for the purposes of ZBrush will be able to

tell where I want hard edges by

being able to create groups out of these UVs.

Before bringing that out, let's straighten

these little edge to line up a little bit.

Make sure we delete all the history.

Now we take both these objects together,

and we're going to triangulate everything.

ZBrush will try to triangulate it for us but it's

often not as good with N-guns as Maya is.

So it's going to be easier if we

make it a triangle first,

and then we can export this as an OBJ file,

which is something that

ZBrush will open natively very well.

Now we can import this OBJ,

wherever it is on our computer.

Draw it out into our scene.

Now that we have it here,

we can separate this into parts.

Go split the parts.

Okay and now we've

separated our battery pack from our switch.

So if I hit shift F,

I can see a little wire frame version of

this model and I can see

the triangulation that I've created.

What I am going to be doing is using the DynaMesh method.

I'm going to be using the DynaMesh system inside of

ZBrush to give me enough geometry,

that I can smooth this out using

some of the Deformation Polish tools.

So we come down to

geometry and let's set the resolution on DynaMesh.

I am trying to start it here,

maybe about 700 or so.

A pretty high number is what

we want though because we want

enough definition that when we use this

Polish by features here,

we can see it creates

a nice little creases and it gives us

those edge reflection features

that we've been looking for.

We could have done that using SubD but we see that using

this particular method for tricky geometry like this,

just a little bit extra work can do this really quickly.

Let's do the same thing here but remember

we separated everything by UVs.

So if we click in poly groups,

auto group by UV.

You see that it creates a separate poly group

for each separate UV shell.

What this means is now if we DynaMesh this again,

at around 700 or so,

that'll keep everything in

these same poly groups even after it's been DynaMeshed.

So now if we come down to deformation polish by features.

We toggle this little button to the open circle,

to make it stronger.

It'll keep a sharp crease

anywhere that there's a separate UV,

and so if we pull this a couple times,

and then we can use this polish tool.

Those sort of general whole surface polish.

It sort of smooths everything out,

to turn that creased edge a little softer.

Now that we have a nice polished surface

and we have plenty of geometry to work with,

we can start building in

that little inset for the actual switch.

So I am turning on symmetry here with the X button,

which will make sure that everything

I do stays symmetrical.

So as I draw this across,

right about halfway down,

it'll repeat it on the other side.

Now, I can come down to the masking tab

to make some adjustments to this mask.

I want sort of rounded corners.

But if I keep blurring and

then alternatingly sharpening the mask,

you can see it'll sort of round out the edges for me.

It would be a lot harder to paint

out these rounded corners by hand,

but by using this blur,

sharpen trick we can do it really easily.

Now, I click off of the model to invert the selection.

We can see that it draws all the way through.

So I want to do another masking to get just this area.

So the darker area will not be

affected and only the lighter area will.

Make a few more adjustments,

maybe shrink the mask up a little bit,

tighten it up around where

that button is, and then sharpen it.

The softer the mask,

the softer the transition will be,

the sharper the mask the more of

a 90-degree edge it's going to create here.

So now go back to the deformation tab

and from some of these deformation tools,

I'm going to go to inflate.

Inflate will push the whole thing along its normal axis.

So if I inflate in a negative direction,

it's going to create a nice little inset just like

this and one of

the reasons I chose to do this particular object

with ZBrush was this particular shape.

This transition of this little bit being pushed

in and I need another little cut right here.

So with the mask still on,

I'm going to just add to it using my Ctrl-drag.

Again, with the x-axis on so,

it mirrors left and right

and then I just Ctrl-Alt-drag

to get rid of a block of that.

So this way now, with my selection,

if I use my move tool

here and I invert

my selection by Ctrl-clicking off of it,

I can just push it backwards

along the z or the blue axis.

To get that little step to the switch inset.

Now, I've dragged my mask out with nothing selected,

which will redial and mesh the whole thing and go

back and do another little polish

just to smooth everything out.

So we can see how quickly we can

make some of these features

that would have taken us a lot longer

to model out in the sub d method.

Now, I want to build out

that little inset on top of the battery pack,

and if I go into transform

and turn on the x and z symmetry,

I can get it functioning in

this sort of square pattern here,

where I can be working on

the same corners all at the same time.

So I'm going to go to my mask tool

and do a mask rectangle,

draw out from the corner that I'd see right

about where the straight line should line up.

But again, because everything's in

symmetry it's going keep it pretty even

across on every side.

Hitting that set pivot will make sure that it centers

my active axes around what I currently

see. So it looks good.

So I'm going to go to my masking menu,

choose mask perfect circle and holding Ctrl and Alt,

I can draw out a circle to remove part of this mask.

Now, I just blur once, shrink it,

sharpen it a little bit just to

get enough roundness to some of these edges.

Make sure we get rid of the mask on the other side.

So just Ctrl-Alt getting rid of that mask,

and now I can turn Ctrl-click off of the model

to invert it and do an inflate.

I'm going to be doing the other features of

this battery pack inside of substance painter.

I'm just using this to make this particular stage here,

just to show you that this

is one of the ways we can approach this.

We're almost done with this, just going to do a

little bit more polishing because again,

what I'm looking for is that shine on the edges.

This is another reason I like basic material two for this

is it really shows me what is going to reflect light.

Before we're ready to export this,

if you look up at the active and total points,

we're looking at 1.2 million up there,

and that's a lot more than

we're going to need to get all these features.

So we're going to use something called

the decimation master.

So if we go into Z plug-in,

we can take a look over

here and go to the decimation master tab,

and we're going to hit preprocess current.

What this is going to do is analyze our mesh,

look for curvature, look for flat surfaces,

and this way by doing all the preprocessing as

a separate step from the actual decimation,

we can apply different levels of decimation

without having to reprocess it every single time.

So this particular step, the pre-process,

doesn't actually change anything about

the geometry it just sort of analyzes it,

and this will take a second.

Okay, now that we processed everything here,

we're ready to actually apply this decimation.

So if we see if we click decimate current,

it looks like nothing's happened,

but you see the active points have dropped by a lot,

and if we Shift-F, we can see how it's

changed the geometry on our model.

It's reduced a lot of geometry.

It's less than a quarter of what it was

originally and now we

can do the same thing with the little switch.

It's a small object, so it will be quicker and so

we can see it's reduced that by like again,

a fifth of what it was originally.

So I'm going to take my sub tool

here and now I'm going to

merge these down so that they're part of the same object,

because I want them all together for my export, and then,

I'm going to export that as

battery high object and save it.

Now back in Maya,

I can import that object,

which we can see still lines

up with our original geometry.

Don't forget to name everything

so that we understand which one is

the battery switch high and

which one is the battery pack high.

Okay. So that's it for

the battery switch and the battery pack.

I'll be using the same technique for

the body and the rest of the cap here.

In the next video, we're going to continue to use

this particular method to help us

provide some of these high poly edges

to some more complicated shapes

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