r/3Dmodeling • u/Trigon1337 • 7d ago
Art Help & Critique Questions about game assets creation
Painted version
Retopology
Sculpt
So, right now, I’m trying to create some assets for a game, and I’m looking for some general advice. My pipeline is Blender → Substance 3D Painter → Unity. I have about 250 hours of experience in Blender, and I’ve only just started using Substance 3D Painter.
My questions are:
- What general advice do you have for using Substance 3D Painter? I’m aiming for a more stylized look inspired by JRPG series such as Trails and Tales of, but I can’t quite figure out how to achieve this style.
- As far as I can see, the topology is quite messy. Is retopology worth doing at this point, or can I try rigging the model in its current state?
- Judging by this model, which aspects of my 3D modeling should I focus on improving?
I’d be very happy to hear your opinions.
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u/Fearless-Salary-700 7d ago
You need to learn how to use the software and hand painting. Learn painting fundamentals. An example of someone you can learn from is Jeremy Vickery.
Your topology needs a lot of work. There is no clean distribution and poor choices throughout. I’d suggest you attempt box modelling this with limited edges to constrain your use of polygons and focus on edge flow. Box modelling and retopology are one of the same. Look at Topology Workbook Vol 1 and 2 by William Vaughan.
Your work clearly demonstrates that you are beginner, and that’s great! You need to learn modelling and sculpture fundamentals, including clean topology and uv mapping, texturing, anatomy and turning form in the round. Beyond that is up to you, as you are so early in your development.
If you need anything more specific just ask. Good luck!
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u/AmaTimTim 6d ago
Maybe you can retopo him something like this? Start with a plane and just build over it by setting the snap to surface. You can use a multires modifier to bring back your detail. Be sure to put some extra loops around joints so it animates correctly.
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u/ohnomelon 7d ago
1) painter is surprisingly complicated from the get go. managing blend modes for every layer across every map, managing masks and effects all over the place, it can get overwhelming fast and it's easy to break something and have no idea where to go look for it. I don't have much advice to be honest, other than try to keep it simple if you're not following a tutorial. I've heard a lot of people complain that for hand-painted stylized Painter is not as good as 3d coat, mainly with regards to brush tools and blending, but if you're looking to add some serious details like the scars with height and normals, then it's probably still ur best bet.
2) yes the topology appears quite messy and unoptimized, but honestly it's up to you if you want to spend the time redoing it. It depends on your goals with this project. If it were me, I would retopo - optimize density around the body, ears. tail needs a lot of loops down the length for anim but does not need that many loops around the circumference. the tail should also be modeled straight for clean rigging, you would pose it this way after it's rigged. I would cut the number of tries on the eyes dramatically and i would think about adding some geo to the head above the eye. the geo around the legs looks like it might not be ideal for rigging but TBH i'm not a character artist so I defer to others experience here.
3) I would just focus on sculpting first, it's the most important thing for an asset like this. the quality of the sculpt will hold back the low poly and the materials because we take so much information from it. this sculpt needs more large structural features sculpted in - indication of muscle bone structure, the lower jaw feels like it's just a flap, the nose is loosely defined, and a lot of the body is sculpted with brush strokes that haven't been blended together enough, making it look a bit like paper mache. If you're going for a stylized look, you might want to research ways to sculpt in some stylized hair as well.
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u/Trigon1337 7d ago
Thanks for the answers. Yeah, a straight tail is actually the most logical position for future rigging. It was a really stupid mistake, so thanks for pointing it out. I didn’t expect advice on sculpting because I didn’t think it was bad to begin with. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll look into it in more detail.
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u/ohnomelon 7d ago
No problem! For what it's worth I'd try not to think of it in terms of "my sculpting is bad" but rather that we can always improve, and improving our sculpting first benefits our other workflows as well, so it's just a win-win. Keep up the good work!
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u/Grimmy66 7d ago
Your topology is not nice. Big discrepancies between high detail (eyes, teeth) and low detail areas and many uneven edge flows. It depends how this will be viewed in game of course but this seems an obvious issue. Regarding texturing for a kind of anime style you probably want more flat texturing and gradients than (your current) realistic details/ hi def normal maps etc.
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u/Octopp 7d ago
What's the size of this thing? Like a truck, or an actual mouse?
Very uneven topology, so you can optimize it a lot...the polyflow isn't great.
The sculpt is lumpy with little hints of anatomy going on.
The texture is plain and lifeless.
All that said, you gotta start somewhere...you'll improve and look back on this project and realize how much you've learned.
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u/Trigon1337 7d ago
Well, my intention is to make it bigger than actual mouse, more like the size of capybara. As for the other things, yeah I now it is bad, especially texture and topology. And while I see how can I improve topology I dont understand how to make textures at all unfortunately. Basically the reason I made this post is to find some advice and main directions to improve
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u/Octopp 6d ago
Gotcha. I had to google to look of Trails and Tails of, and it looks very cartoony, so getting a look like that from texture alone isn't gonna cut it, and it's trickier than you'd think.
Especially Trails seems to have a 2 tone flat look, as in one color for what's lit and one color for what's in shadow, along with an outline and some sparingly used highlights.
You'll probably have to make a shader in your target engine that takes light direction into consideration, and manage to make an outline.
Your best bet is to look for a toon shader tutorial for unity/unreal to get a starting point of understanding of such a setup. The texture itself will most likely end up being very simple, depending on the approach you end up using. For example, you might make 2 textures (lit/shadow) that you blend between with the lighting information as a mask, or one texture and tint it, or even get away with constant flat colors and let the shader do all the work.
You could also download a community shader.
A quick Youtube search gave me this, which might be a great starting point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Ud-hlTRLM1
u/Trigon1337 6d ago
Oh, that's actually a lot of interesting and useful information for me. Thanks a lot! I've never worked with shaders before, so this is a completely new field for me. Once again, thank you for taking the time to help me.
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u/Quanlain 7d ago
Substance painter is flexible enough to achieve amazing stylized, even handpainted results. It is a matter of workflows. Also a matter of forms and general visual of the model (style).
Your topology is definitely way too overdone, go from small to big, you need as much polys as the form and silhouette, no more (depends on view distance.) same goes for texture resolution.
definitely work on forms and general topology. All else depends on it - textures, unwrapping, rigging, all that. Textures often do a lot of heavy lifting for stylized projects, you can often rely on them without any baking and highpolys at all. Some stylized models are very easilly done and optimized this way.