How do you make the 3D pipeline less painful?

lucaK25 · 12:23PM

Hey folks,

I’ve been working on both characters and props for games, mostly splitting time between Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter, with the occasional Maya session when needed. I love the creative side of it, but some stages in the pipeline still feel like a slog.

For me, texturing and sculpting can be especially draining, and sometimes the retopo/UV/baking combo (even with RizomUV or Marmoset) ends up eating way more time than I’d like. It often feels like I’m fighting the process instead of moving forward.

Are there newer tools, plugins, or workflows you’ve found that actually make these stages faster? Or is it just “suck it up and put in the hours”?

I’m curious if there’s really nothing out there that speeds up the back-and-forth for us 3D artists. Would love to hear what works for you.

Joao Sapiro · 12:54PM

would be important to see your work method and how you approach those.

Usually that feeling can come through a broken part of the workflow\needlessly complicated. So to check if its due to that would be cool to see what your process usually is, preferable with visual examples.

zetheros · 1:45PM

speed just comes from experience. Only recently did I wrap my fat head around the substance designer naming system to automatically output textures that unreal engine would recognize, without me having to manually name each and every map.

What in particular about texturing & sculpting do you find most time consuming?

Klunk · 2:32PM

you need to work on your "prompts"

though seriously it's the kind of stuff that AI should be used for.... automation of the tedious

AsdiusWork · 2:38PM

I think it's a topic we all fall into at some point, and we become so familiar with these techniques that we end up mastering them. But really, from my perspective, I'm looking for an add-on or specific flow for something very specific, and the combination of these makes the entire flow better. But I don't know of a tool that's just right for everything yet.

lucaK25 · 3:17PM

Thanks all for the replies. Fair enough that speed mostly comes with experience, but I like what @Klunk says about AI helping with the automation of the tedious. Everyone’s talking about it, is there really nothing that people actually use in a proper game pipeline? Feels crazy given how much AI is showing up everywhere else.

lucaK25 · 3:18PM

And to answer the question about my process, Blender or ZBrush for sculpting, then Substance for texturing, RizomUV or Marmoset for UVs/bakes.

The bits that kill me are:

– Jumping between sculpt > bake > tweak > rebake.

– Manually fixing UV shells to avoid stretching/texel issues.

@AsdiusWork what’s the add-on / flow combo you mentioned? And has anyone found anything that actually makes either of those steps less painful?

zetheros · 3:58PM

lucaK25 said:

Thanks all for the replies. Fair enough that speed mostly comes with experience, but I like what @Klunk says about AI helping with the automation of the tedious. Everyone’s talking about it, is there really nothing that people actually use in a proper game pipeline? Feels crazy given how much AI is showing up everywhere else.

I haven't found AI to be helpful yet (to me), and from my understanding of how it works, I don't know if it will ever

lucaK25 · 4:05PM

Interesting. What have you tried so far and for what parts of the workflow? Why didn't it work?

zetheros · 5:23PM

mostly stable diffusion for reference, but I can get higher quality references by looking around and using the portfolios of artists more talented than me.

3d AI is still in it's infancy and I don't see it overtaking handmade work, and you definitely don't want to vibe code. Everything about game development demands precision and non destructive workflows so you can do more and optimize more. Generative AI is the opposite of that

Also Disney is suing Midjourney, so there's that

pior · 7:31PM

"For me, texturing and sculpting can be especially draining, and sometimes the retopo/UV/baking combo (even with RizomUV or Marmoset) ends up eating way more time than I’d like. It often feels like I’m fighting the process instead of moving forward."

Well, all of this is self-imposed really. Nothing forces you to work on models at a level of detail/fidelity requiring complex pipelines or hundreds of hours.

If the process feels like a chore, the solution isn't to hope for automagical tools (AI or not) to speed it up, but rather, to refocus on something you enjoy more. Or establishing strict time goals and adjusting fidelity and processes around them.

Lastly, wishing for AI to automate the tedious is IMHO a pretty bad idea. Because the day some automagical AI tool will be able to do proper UVs for you, will also be the day when you won't be needed anymore as a modeler because there will be plagiarism machines available for that aswell, and the job of a 3D modeler will only consist of cleaning things up.

If UVs feel like a chore to you know, that's probably just because you are not quite there in terms of modeling efficiently with UVs in mind.

zetheros · 7:45PM

UVs and retopology are too contextual and support too many other branches of game development, AI would simply not be the right tool.

How do you make the 3D pipeline less painful?

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