This week has been full of learning! I had made considerable progress in my modeling and decided it was time to take some of the objects into Substance Painter in order to get the best materials for my photorealistic visualization. Or so I thought! Now, this is the first time I’ve used this software as well so it was a bit of a learning curve but I jumped right in. Taking both objects that I modeled and objects that I found online into the software in order to start working on materials. I found out quickly that lots of prep needs to be done to the meshes in order to provide a seamless workflow. I watched a few videos on the interface and felt ready to bring in some of the models I had downloaded from some online 3D object repositories. These objects were in various formats and I tried each one of them just to see what would happen. I discovered that .FBX files with multiple material groups and previously unwrapped UVs works the best (even though the software now has an auto UV unwrap feature that works pretty well).
The tutorials that really helped me are linked below:
I found that these three videos gave me a good workflow to model as well as some practical theory to apply in my texturing. The combination also showed me some of the potential that this software has that may be currently out of my comfort zone but presented something to strive for. I wish that that last video focused more on the texturing rather than the modeling because the model is fairly simple and the texturing does a lot to take it to the next level in terms of quality. Again, the majority of these use 3dsMax as the modeling software in their workflow which is a bit frustrating since it’s obviously not a 1-to-1 follow along for Blender as far as the procedures go for breaking up the mesh for the UVs and creating different material groups. Not something that was too difficult to figure out on my own, but it added another step to the learning process. Which is currently a little ridiculous since I’m learning two new programs and trying to take my modeling in Blender to a more polished level.
Once I failed a few times, I started to get the hang of the process and determined that it was necessary to drop about half of the interior objects that I had started adding to my scene. For the most part these were objects that I had downloaded from the web that had some questionable topologies and I didn’t want to spend the time fixing them. So I turned to using Blender to unwrap the objects that I modeled for my base structure and started to break of the UVs and separate various elements so that multiple materials could be added to the objects. It was a step back in terms of what I had in my scene but a large step forward in terms of the future ease of workflow between Blender, Substance Painter, and UE4.
I ended up deciding to use Substance painter to create my materials not only because of its high quality output and ease of creation but due to the fact that I can create one material and export it for both Blender and UE4. Since Blender is open source, the Datasmith workflow is only available through contributed add-ons, which have difficulty in converting Blender materials to UE4 materials on a one-one basis. Substance painter will do it for both and keep the quality high as well.
I’ve taken some progress renders to show a bit of where I’ve been at over the last few days.