Uv mapping and texturing 3d game weapons

Creating the model intended for sculpting and the beginning of what our high poly model will be. We take your initial concept ideas and create professional weapon sculpts that best suit your requirements. The process of converting high-resolution models into low poly ones of the same high quality and photorealism. The 3D modeling process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model's surface for texture mapping. Taking your weapon models to the next level by adding high frequency detail, surface texture, or colour information.

Post a Project. Learn More. Find Unreal Engine Heroes. What we do? Concept art Create the concept art to help get your 3D weapon model visualized. Base Mesh Modeling Creating the model intended for sculpting and the beginning of what our high poly model will be. The following clip illustrates the process in detail. This will allow you to find them a little bit easier in the 2D window when texture painting. Next, pack the shells as efficiently as possible into the UV tile to get the most out of the available UV space.

Leave enough room between each island to apply decent pixel padding. It also makes sense to scale up shells of small but distinctive elements of the model and scale down invisible or internal parts.

In our case, we can decrease the size of the UV island that represents the inside of the barrel for instance. Once everything is set up, I will run a little script that turns the borders of the UV shells into hard edges on the mesh. The code can be found here. We are now only a few steps away from exporting both the highpoly and the lowpoly mesh for baking.

To ensure this, combine the parts in different groups as illustrated in the screenshot below. Do the same for the highpoly and the lowpoly version of your model. Next, assign different materials to the highpoly parts that you want to colorize separately in the ID map.

This map allows us to select and mask parts of the geometry easily in Substance Painter later on. This prevents the game engine from triangulating the mesh itself upon import which can end up producing distorted textures.

Now you are ready to export! Baking maps and transferring details from highpoly to lowpoly can be done with different tools nowadays. The maps you can see in the screenshot below were created in Marmoset Toolbag. We need some of them to generate different textures in Substance Painter later on.

Alternatively, you could also bake all maps directly in Substance Painter. Marmoset Toolbag is not only a fantastic tool for presenting your models in a PBR environment, it has also become great for baking. First, bring the FBX files of the highpoly and lowpoly model to Marmoset. Then create a new Baker node and assign the parts accordingly. If you add the baker before you import the FBX files, you can use the Quick Loader to import and assign all elements automatically.

To make this work, all parts of the lowpoly and highpoly mesh must be named accordingly on export. Before you begin tweaking the settings, set an output path in the Baker palette and make sure only Normals is checked in the Maps section. In case you encounter any baking issues, you can now select the container of a lowpoly mesh and adjust the cage distance and skew values by using the brush tool directly in the viewport.

For Ambient Occlusion, Ignore Groups should remain unchecked. The screenshot on the left shows the AO calculated when including mesh groups that we defined before we exported the model from Maya.

Remember, no elements are touching each other, which allow us to create clean normal maps. The AO looks good, but it is not correct as the parts that belong together do not interact properly. The image on the right shows what happens when Ignore Groups is checked. Now it correctly creates the AO and components that are close together are interacting with each other. You can solve this problem by grouping the highpoly and lowpoly mesh differently and repeat the AO baking process for each element, or you can follow this quick workaround using only the lowpoly mesh for baking and a tool called Faogen.