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https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
How do you make the 3D pipeline less painful?
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.
Replies
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.
What in particular about texturing & sculpting do you find most time consuming?
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
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
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.
Sounds to me a bit like you looking into the more technical side of things would be the better choice for you?
UVs retopo struggles sounds mostly like an experience thing to me. Do it often enough to find your shortcuts. Maybe enforce some time constraints to yourself to see what works best for you.
Tbh my workflow is easily 15-20 years old and still holds up even with the ancient tools i use in these parts.
Obviously experience plays a role, but take your time whenever the circumstances allow it. In the end, UVs are like a puzzle. You might just as well enjoy the process or at least take pride in a job well done. Not always possible in practice, of course.
Rebaking is always a pain, though, I'd agree. Setting up everything correctly (naming conventions etc.) so you only have to push a button after your tweaks are done definitely helps.
Hey all, thanks again for the replies, really appreciate the range of perspectives here.
I thought about all this over the weekend, and came up with the following idea, which I think would save me (and hopefully everyone else in this thread?) so much time. That's just to fantasize ahah, but wouldn't something like this be cool?
I'm imagining a platform/assistant with a flow like this:
This wouldn't be a replacement for ZBrush/Substance/etc., but something to speed up the “glue” work in between. Wouldn't it be cool if there was something like this? What do you think?
To the OP :
"A UV co-pilot overlays stretch/TD heatmaps, proposes seams you can accept/tweak,"
"wouldn't something like this be cool?"
Well not really, since seams are placed (or at least planned ahead) *while* modeling the low, as they very much influence the modeling. Hoping for an assistant to design them for you after the fact is somewhat absurd and wouldn't be much better than the many automatic or semi-automatic UV tools already available today.
What you are describing is close to one-day throwaway models that are not meant to go in the final game. And while such quick models can be interesting experiments (and as said they can certainly be done in less than a day with the currently available tools, ie tools that have been available for about 10+ years already), in actual practice they're not so hot as ingame placeholders since they take about the same time to do as a regular clean blockout ... and a clean blockout has the big advantage of being a starting point for the final model later as opposed to being fully throwaway. As a matter of fact it seems to be what Valve is doing with their Deadlock models. And if production needs to speed up unexpectedly, a clean blockout ready for quick cleanup and texturing will always be more useful than a sculpted model bruteforced into a pseudo-realtime model that needs to be redone from scratch.
Now of course new tools are always fun to think about (and certainly interesting to develop). But I genuinely believe that the time of an artist is better spent on developing efficient working habits with the tools available today, than on daydreaming about the next automagical thing.
Blanked out the name to discourage SEO, but I'm sure you could find it if you looked hard enough.
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