TL;DRAfter concept handoff, the artist takes the model into ZBrush, here building on the existing Odyssey helmet for efficiency and performance, then retopologizes it in a program like TopoGun or Maya.
So from here, it's not always the case, but some of the times the concept artists work in 3D, so they'll hand off a starting point in 3D. They smash stuff together, so there's quite a bit of cleanup and all that, which is totally fine. So once Jeremiah hands this off, I'm going to ZBrush. This is the finished model, but I can show you here. All the red is the already existing low poly from the Odyssey helmet. This is one of the ones where we're trying to leverage part of an existing helmet to speed this process along. Then we, from concept on, retrofitted all this stuff into it.
This helmet was built on top of the existing Odyssey helmet for a number of reasons. One, it's just more efficient to do that when you can. It's also more efficient performance-wise when you can have as many shared assets and resources as possible in the game.
Yeah. So in terms of any type of cleanup, often when we get things, things aren't quite lining up. It's often as simple as just making things line up and then polishing things out. I don't want to stay too long in the ZBrush phase. But from there, once that's all good and happy, jump into a program like TopoGun or Maya to retopologize it.
Because it's completely symmetrical. You only need to make half of this, and then once this is good, I'll jump in Maya, mirror it over, stitch it together, and move on. But I can show you. It's as simple as this. You just end up building out parts of it like this. It's not the fastest part of the pipeline, but eventually you get to this point. The other big thing at this point is looking at the concept compared to the low. With our texturing pipe, we're masking with blend maps, which is texture-based, but we're also masking through geometry to block out submaterials. So at this point, you've got to keep in mind how many submats you're going to want and how much you want to break it down.
So I can show you a little bit easier. Each one of these colors is a different submat. And what that means is it gets to use four channels of a blend map per color. So when you're looking at the concept, you've got to take a moment to really plan out how you want to cut the geo up, because sometimes you end up getting into game when you're texturing and you're like, oh, actually, I can't really accomplish what I want. So go back to the low poly stage, cut some more geo in, break out this piece, rebuild your material, and then continue forward like that. So that's the only part where you really have to think about exactly what you want to get in the end.
TL;DRGeometry is split into many pieces so each part gets four texture mask layers stacked on a base, allowing more complex materials and faster texturing.
I took this one pretty far in terms of separating it, partly because I wanted to make the texturing side just faster. What that means is this yellow part, if I wanted to texture it, looking at the concept: oh, it's kind of like an exposed metal, but it has some edge wear and stuff like that. By breaking out just this piece, I get four channels for it. So base layer would be like a brass, and then I can start to build up other materials on top of it. So the further we break the stuff down, the more complicated we can really go with the actual texture.
Yeah, the way to think of it is we're using an RGBA, and the alpha is the base layer, and then we're just stacking up materials on top of that. So it goes alpha, then blue channel, then green, then red. And with that, there's the methodology of: whatever's taking up the most room, try to leave that for the alpha channel. So you're continually getting smaller on the actual texture coverage as you go up that chain, just because it's an easier way to work.
TL;DRUV mapping lays 3D geometry out flat so 2D textures wrap without warping or skewing, much like car wraps or papercraft, and cutting UVs along material divisions makes texturing easier.
So that when you do apply textures and details like that, it doesn't warp and get all crazy. So I can do something like this. You can see here, it's not bad warping, but it's a bit. You want these squares to be as square as possible all the time, because anywhere where this is warping, if I put a material that, let's say, has a lot of vertical lines, you'll see that. The lines will start to skew. It'll show up in not a great way in the game because you'll see that it's skewing that way. So that's what UV-ing is all about.
So it's almost like when people do wraps on their car. It comes in a big flat thing, but when you look at it all flat, it's weirdly shaped and odd. But it's because they're anticipating all of the shapes and curves of the car and they're flat printing.
Yeah, something else is, I think it's called papercraft. There's websites for it where you can basically get different plans of how you cut something out and then fold it together, and then you have a little character or something like that. It's the exact same stuff. So it's a very important phase.
It's taking something that is flat but needs to wrap over a surface that is not flat in any way. So you can see how it's all broken down. Based on the submats I set up, I often try to also have my UVs cut out that way. It just makes texturing easier because I can do texturing things based off of what my UV unwrap is, so just an efficiency thing.
I can attempt to, but I might not have that working file anymore. But I can probably get it to work. So with Substance Painter, if I exported this in there, it wouldn't work very well, because every different material I have applied in Painter would show up as a different texture set. So it'd basically break out all the geo as you see it here, and that's not really usable like that.
It's not like you set a quota and then you get that quota and then you relax. You just work and work and add and work and add. What's the next thing we can do?
TL;DRA head does fit, because the helmet is built on the in-game Odyssey helmet whose proportions were already worked out, and it has more internal room than it looks.
It is the virtue of building off of a pre-existing asset. Since it's all been worked out for the Odyssey, and the Odyssey is in-game, it's functional, we know the head fits in it. Building over the Odyssey saves us a lot of time with the metrics.
I feel like people have definitely seen bugs around this where they see a human face stretched across objects. This is our base male's UV layout, and all the heads actually have this UV layout.
Yeah. And this is the usual setup for doing any kind of head stuff. You just want to maximize the UV space as much as possible. And as you can see, towards the less important areas, which is like the back of the head, you allow for quite a lot of stretching, just because we'll have hair and hats and all kinds of things and you'll never really see it.
TL;DRNon-destructive means painting through masks on fill layers rather than flat paint layers, so effects can be changed, reordered or removed later without redoing work.
So normally when you would paint, I can make a paint layer here, and then this would be actually I'm painting. But now if I'm like, oh, I don't like that, it's just a paint layer. So it's flat; I can't really do anything with that. But with something like this, you drop down a fill layer, add a mask, and now I'm actually doing all the work through a mask. So this paint layer is actually just flooding this with white, but the mask is actually driving where stuff can show up. So I have this, but then I can come in here, add a paint layer, drop that down, switch this to multiply. And because it's multiplying on nothing, it doesn't show up, but now I can start to bring in: no, I just want it to show up in these areas. And it's all about, like I said, non-destructive. So you can do so many things just back and forth with this. Like, oh, I don't like this paint layer, I can switch this on top and see what kind of results I get.
TL;DRSubstance Painter automatically flattens the 3D work into a square texture based on the UV layout made in Maya, working at a high source resolution that isn't used in-game.
I can showcase it like this. So here is my UV layout. I can get rid of the material response. This isn't really useful to work in this view like this, but yeah. And then I can show both. We work completely in 4K. That's not what we use actually in games because it's way too expensive, but we always work at that source level.
It's amazing to me that it takes all these other pieces and then not just flattens them out, but then finds the most efficient way to fit them all into a square.
Yeah, this is all manual. It's like extreme packing. I didn't do this manually. I ran a process. Like I said, I was trying to be fast. Normally what you want to do, if I was doing a clothing asset, having everything skewed like this, you usually don't want that, because then fabric, like my shirt, it's running very horizontal. Now if all my stuff is skewed, you have to think of how on a monitor the pixels are drawing; you start to get weird anti-aliasing. So a way to avoid that or minimize it is make sure your UVs are laid out up, down, left, right, pretty straight. But for something like this, I wasn't worried about that.
TL;DRThe mask is effectively one giant attachment and its own helmet, so any further attachment would be a separate item built specifically for that helmet, since helmet shapes vary too much for generic ones.
The way it's built, it really has become its own helmet. If we're going to talk about helmet attachments for something like this, we're just going to add stuff to it. If there was some kind of, I don't know, this attachment gives you zoom-in vision, kind of like a spec ops optical thing off on one side, we would build that specifically to this helmet so that it can fit in appropriately.
It'd be a separate item. We would build a separate item for this specifically. Because our helmets are such varying shapes, there's no other way to go about it. We'd have to do it unique to the helmet. Which in the end, I think the way we've gone is totally fine, because a spec ops optical thing, you wouldn't want that on the Explorer helmet, right? It wouldn't make sense.
Yeah, maybe like a small antenna type thing could be decently uniform, but it all comes down to how much that attachment actually touches the helmet. So something like that, yeah, sure, we could make something very generic for that. Its position would be driven by a joint.
Fifteen submaterials. That's what each one of these are. We also obviously use glass. If I had the glass in there, that's not something we'd use layer blend for. It'd be the actual glass material. This helmet doesn't actually have glass; this one does. So we use a glass material as well. And then we also use an Illum sometimes, because then we can do glowy stuff like this. So Illum is a specific shader. In terms of setting up glows, we can do it now through layer blend or we can do it through an Illum. The advantage with the layer blend glow is you get to do really fun stuff because it's texture based.
For this? No, we do not. And the reason why we don't have that: every helmet, how it's set up is very unique to that helmet. So in terms of randomizing, there are directions we can go in to get that functionality, but it's super fucking difficult.
So this is a Pinterest board. It's my own, one I set up. It's really just, you'll start to see, oh, here's a clump of purple stuff, here's some green stuff, here's some white and gold. It's all just giving yourself something to look at and then give yourself a direction to go in. I could just sit here not looking at reference, but this gets a result faster and you end up with more ideas to run with.
And there's stuff from all different styles here. It's not a question of whether it's manga or sci-fi or fantasy or whatever; you're looking for color combinations.
No, it worked fine, because that's what I did work off of. All I'm really saying is this is sloppy. This giant piece, me letting it be this giant piece, not very efficient. I could have cut it here and then, instead of it bowing out, made it a little bit straighter, and I could pack it a little bit better. So if we look at the Odyssey helmet, much better layout. Even just visually, you're like, oh, okay, this seems oriented better. This step comes down to the artists, what they're willing to try to get away with to save time, because in the end, we're trying to put a lot of content out.
Yeah, I could make this all glass. We're not going to do that today. I did do that a while ago. Actually, I made an all-glass everything: armor, undersuit, helmet. I did it really fast and it was really fun. We were joking, it's like, oh, we'll give this to devs only. It'll be a predator suit. There'll just be these creepy devs in the background wearing their full glass armor. But the only issue with that is it would probably still show your head and your body. So you'd just be a guy in underwear running around with some glass over you. Not the coolest thing.
If it's any smaller than this, I wouldn't have done that, because it would just be way too expensive and not really worth it. And this is another thing where it just comes down to the artist's call. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes it's not. It's just case by case.