… but with two great new sources back
One thing in advance. I am giving my own, personal and most importantly unpaid opinion here!
For a very long time, nothing happened on the site for various reasons. However, the project itself is not in danger. In the meantime, as it is my way, I have continued to look around for useful things. In the process, I came across two extremely good things that I would now like to share with you.
Firstly:
I have been following Josh Gambrell on YouTube for a long time. He posts new videos on his channel very regularly. His focus is on hard surface modelling and he is very willing to show his workflow. Apart from his favourite tools (Hardops and Boxcutter) he also has enough tutorials focusing on the pure Blender toolset (Vanilla Blender). As his name suggests his tutorials are in English but he is, in my opinion, very easy to understand. If I remember correctly from one of his videos, he lives in Orlando and studies maths. On top of that, he makes so many useful tutorials for the Blender community and does it constantly over such a long period of time, which simply deserves my respect and recognition.
I just recently became aware of his website BlenderBros, which he and his buddy Ponte Ryuurui run. There is free material as well, but the focus of the site is on large, comprehensive and detailed tutorials that you can buy.
I usually avoid anything commercial because 3D, Blender, Unreal are my hobbies and I don’t make money with them, but I once made an exception here.
Why?
Because:
There are extremely detailed tutorials focusing on the workflow for games. That’s exactly the topic I’m dealing with at the moment. The techniques that are covered seemed to be extremely helpful for my path. In addition, and what recently convinced me to buy some of the videos, was that the design aspects are also discussed. Basically an all-round carefree package for me.
I chose the packages The Hard Surface Game Asset Course, Hard Surface UV Unwrapping and The Blender Bros Design Course. The discount granted for 3 days after registration plus the Euro – Dollar exchange rate, which was good for me, made the decision to buy easier.
In the tutorials, some basic and helpful settings in Blender are shown, there is, of course, modelling and everything is explained extremely well. Fixing shading issues are covered in great detail. What I never realised is that it is better to triangulate the models in Blender before importing them into game engines.
UV mapping, a favourite topic of mine back in Maya days, is also addressed in detail. I found his approach most remarkable.
An equally large focus is on non-destructive modelling. Unlike in Photoshop, where this way of working is clear to me, in Blender I always lacked the approach of how to implement it in modelling.
Secondly:
Among other things, the tool Quixel Mixer is used in the workflow. Surprisingly, I hadn’t even been aware of it until now. Fortunately, it’s free and has become part of the “Unreal cosmos”. From now on, I will also be using it, because it massively supports the texturing of the models.
According to my research so far, Quixel Mixer does not offer any baking options. However, I came across this tutorial which explains the Baking process (Normals, Ambient Occlusion, Curverture and Ids) in extreme detail. All of this is groundwork for use in Quixel Mixer.
I will also try to adopt the procedure shown here. According to the motto of my website “why should you search for something I have already found” here is the video.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)