Modo fellows,whats your game art workflow?
polycounter lvl 12
Lately we see a lot of threads opening about modo,people want to know how much it is capable for game art.Personally I can really say its very awesome at modeling,uving and rendering but we guys I mean game-artists has some specific workflows like baking,etc.
Even though I'm fairly familiar with modeling side of the application, there's still some problems with 'baking' side of the job.How do you modo guys importing your stuff outside of modo?How do you bake your normal maps?And how do you maintain right vertex normals inside of the app?What kind of tricks do you have like scripts,tools something like that?How do you overcome the shortcomings of the app(game-art wise)?
It seems like I always find myself learning something new from every 'is modo worth using?' threads where is the rare cases that most of modo guys meeting together.So I wanted to open up a new thread just for this purpose,thanks
Even though I'm fairly familiar with modeling side of the application, there's still some problems with 'baking' side of the job.How do you modo guys importing your stuff outside of modo?How do you bake your normal maps?And how do you maintain right vertex normals inside of the app?What kind of tricks do you have like scripts,tools something like that?How do you overcome the shortcomings of the app(game-art wise)?
It seems like I always find myself learning something new from every 'is modo worth using?' threads where is the rare cases that most of modo guys meeting together.So I wanted to open up a new thread just for this purpose,thanks
Replies
edit* jk, Farfarer did a great job explaining
-I personally use it for the high poly, low poly, and the unwrap only...
-I setup the cage, edges, and smoothing groups and bake in Max, or Maya depending on client, or what engine it's made for.
-Sometimes I will also throw my models into xNormal for a bake of special maps, like curvature or PRTpn maps.
-Inside Max I use a script from TexTools for separating the smoothing groups at UV Islands. I use a similar script in Maya. (Maybe EQ will post it)
Maybe in the next version of Modo, we can see some game art features. They recently added smoothing group support(in 501 maybe?) which had games in mind when they made it. Right now there's not a lot of control on stuff like cages, vertex normals, and that kind of a thing.
Model high poly.
Duplicate, subdivide or freeze, pull out loops and touch up mesh to get low poly.
Unwrap low.
Export both to FBX (you'll have to Geometry > Freeze high poly mesh first).*
Bake in xNormal (synced to engine).*
Import FBX to game engine.*
*If it's a tiling texture, I'll just bake straight up in modo.
Organic;
Model base mesh, export to obj.
Sculpt, export a high and a mid res version as obj.
Bring mid-res into modo and retopo for low poly.
Unwrap low.
Export low to FBX.
Bake high obj to low FBX in xNormal (synced to engine).
Import FBX to game engine.
Some points on why I do this;
Modo will export FBX with vertex normals (but not tangents/binormals) so you can be sure they're accurate to your model during baking. So long as your game engine imports them and your xNormal is synced, you'll get the right result in-game (but it'll look wrong in modo which sucks).
With xNormal, if you tick "Cage" on your low poly but don't provide one in the file slot, it'll generate an average normal projection cage by default (but bake to your hardened exported normals if you have any) so I'll sometimes split the edges I want to be hard before export. Generally, though, I stick to 1 smoothing group for everything as most of what I do isn't hard-surface stuff.
I'm a bit lazy when it comes to cages, generally I'll try and model stuff to ensure that the average normal cage gives me a good bake anyway. But if I have to, I'll use xNormal to create a cage for a specific bake. Obviously this wouldn't fly in a proper production pipeline, but I don't use modo at work so it's not an issue. If I did, I'd probably end up saving a morph map that I could export as a cage for xNormal.