3D models - 01

The last few weeks have required me to get to grips with 3D modelling and retopology with Blender 3D.
The original high poly sculpts I got from the concept artist JacksWorks were originally created to be able to draw out all the concept art for the Constructs (I’ll share those when the first part of the release takes place)
They weren’t made for game engines as the poly count is in the millions per model due to being sculpted in Zbrush. This doesn’t include the weapon and hardware sculpts either.
By reducing the polycount in Zbrush on export I’ve been able to get the poly count down to around 250k to 600k per construct.

To get the models to even load in Tabletop simulator they can’t have more than 26k faces on a model.
Decimating (automatically reducing the poly count) the meshes in Blender resulted in a lot of visual artifacts.
The next step was rigging them so they could be placed in different poses. For this I used Mixamo which automatically sets up the bones and rig.
Unfortunately this led to a lot of warping as most models in games are organic which means they can have some bend and twist on the mesh itself.
The constructs in Interferion are mechanical, twists in the mesh due to the auto rigging led to even more visual artifacts and looked wrong.

The Head and groin section are heavily warped from the Mixamo rigging process :(

I decided to just see it through to see if I could get them to load into TTS (Tabletop Simulator). This worked out fine as a trial run but there were still a lot of problems to overcome.
For me the visual quality was terrible and didn’t come close to the original sculpts and I would have to create a new mesh for every combination of hardware, weapon and weight class of each construct.
This would result in creating over 1000 different model combinations, an impossible amount to keep track of and create the code for in TTS.

Unity Asset Bundles

I discovered that TTS could load Unity Asset bundles (A file format from Unity that allows multiple meshes and other components to be bundled into one asset and loaded in one go).
This had quite a few advantages.
The poly count limit was much higher and would allow more detailed in game models.
I could add all the weapons and hardware to a construct model, load that into TTS and then disable the unused weapons and hardware meshes.
This would reduce creating 1000+ models down to 3.

I discovered after a few days of work that the disabled weapon and hardware meshes are still visible on the TTS model when its picked up and moved.
The TTS discord channels sadly reported to me that there was no workaround for this problem which has been present for years…
At least I now knew that it was possible to build a pipeline from Blender > Unity > TTS which would work and allow me to edit and update geometry assets efficiently and simply.

Various screen shots of the models loaded into Unity.

I’ll make a follow up blog in a few days to show the rest of the work that’s taken place with rigging and posing the high poly sculpt models.
I’ll also share how I’ve gotten the poly count down without using decimation and kept a much better level of quality with the models.

Thanks for dropping by.
All the best.