Blender - HOps, Meshmachin3 workflow for Games, help?
Hello everyone! (I am new here)
Let me explain my situation a bit. I am competent at organic sculpting in Zbrush and using substance painter. I have a released game under my belt so I know of the traditional workflows from my team mates when it comes to high/low/baking hard surfaces etc.
With blender, everything feels more accessible to me and with plugins like HardOps, Fluent, Boxcutter, Meshmach3, Decalmachin3, I feel like I could move away from traditional Subdiv modelling and throw great looking models out much quicker. It all kind of feels like "the future" to me.
However, I am unsure if this type of modelling is suitable for games and I'm really struggling to look for some "do's and don'ts" when it comes to using something like meshmachin3 for games. I do feel like I could make good High and Low poly objects easily, but I don't know if I'm overwhelming myself with too many plugins to learn at once.
So I'm just looking for any advice on what you guys think would be best. Should I stick to one or two plugins? Is the bevel workflow great for some things but not others? If anyone has any tutorials that shows a workflow from start to finish for games, that would be great, because my google-foo is failing me.
Thanks in advance x
Let me explain my situation a bit. I am competent at organic sculpting in Zbrush and using substance painter. I have a released game under my belt so I know of the traditional workflows from my team mates when it comes to high/low/baking hard surfaces etc.
With blender, everything feels more accessible to me and with plugins like HardOps, Fluent, Boxcutter, Meshmach3, Decalmachin3, I feel like I could move away from traditional Subdiv modelling and throw great looking models out much quicker. It all kind of feels like "the future" to me.
However, I am unsure if this type of modelling is suitable for games and I'm really struggling to look for some "do's and don'ts" when it comes to using something like meshmachin3 for games. I do feel like I could make good High and Low poly objects easily, but I don't know if I'm overwhelming myself with too many plugins to learn at once.
So I'm just looking for any advice on what you guys think would be best. Should I stick to one or two plugins? Is the bevel workflow great for some things but not others? If anyone has any tutorials that shows a workflow from start to finish for games, that would be great, because my google-foo is failing me.
Thanks in advance x
Replies
That said, they're just tools and or QoL features, it's not like the geometry they create is magic. (They just make you feel like it
Depending on what you need they may fit the bill. They really excel at "mid poly" modeling, and if you look into how that impacts gameplay performance you'll understand what's going on exactly. You may still find the occasional need to use SubD High -> Low poly workflow, or you could even bake the bevels to a low poly if you want.
Ultimately, mid-poly vs low-poly with normal map is down to whatever trade off you want in performance, render more vertices? Or store & render more normal maps?
I think these days people are happy to throw an extra couple of polygons at the problem if it saves them baking an entire normal map just for a few bevelled edges.
Everything I just said was relevant only for static meshes. If you're doing characters or deforming meshes you're going to want to make sure that you run a topology pass over the meshes before using them. Hops/Boxcutter are very boolean oriented so you'll have to spend some time doing cleanup if you want to deform the output mesh. Meshmachin3 has a lot of tools for manipulating bevels, managing your topology through it is pretty good.
By the way, @MACHIN3 frequents these forums, so I'm sure he'd have more to say. Not sure if masterxeon is but he's active on twitter
These might interest you, masterxeon walks through asset generation via HardOps from Modeling, Triangulation, UV Mapping, SPainter Surfacing and finalised output in Eevee. Can't say I've yet too actually test this current suite of HS plugins since my current system specs are incompatible with 2.8x gen apps. Anyway looks fun probably worth at least a preview for workflow tips alone.
Cheers.