[Tutorials] Arma 3 Asset Creation: Modeling/Texturing Video Series

[soul_assassin 1723]

On a most resent small project for RHS I decided to film the process. Here are the videos below:

1: High poly

2: Low poly

3: UV Mapping

4: Baking diffuse color in 3dsmax

5: Baking normals and AO in xNormal

6: dDo Texturing

COMING SOON

7: O2

COMING SOON

Feel free to subscribe to my channel while you are there :)!

Edited September 4, 2013 by Soul_Assassin

[odyseus 19]

On a most resent small project for RHS I decided to film the process. Here are the videos below:

1: High poly

2: Low poly

3: UV Mapping

4: Baking diffuse color in 3dsmax

5: Baking normals and AO in xNormal

COMING SOON

6: dDo Texturing

COMING SOON

7: O2

COMING SOON

Feel free to subscribe to my channel while you are there :)!

OWw great stuff! Hope blender has similar options! :D

[LongshotAU 10]

Excellent, I've been looking for a tutorial just like this, definitely need more of them for the community.

Subscribed!

[soul_assassin 1723]

Added baking in xNormal in the OP.

[lennard 447]

This will surely help a lot of people who are getting into modeling for games and Arma in particular. Great job!

Looking forward to seeing you work with dDo, had a chance to test it myself with the free alpha. It sure can help a lot in creating a convincing texture.

[-ghost-tf 12]

Thanks man, exactly what I needed.

Subscribed.

[Pomi Git 256]

Thank you for this. This thread should be added to this list:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?152775-Nordkindchens-Sammelsurium

[HJohnson 16]

Finally, I'll figure out why my normal maps and specular maps which look totally fine in Blender turn out WRONG in Arma.

[Foxy69 10]

Magic...... Thank You. This is what I need. Make you still the other two Tutorials? Thank you in advance......

[x3kj 1247]

This will surely help a lot of people who are getting into modeling for games and Arma in particular. Great job!

Looking forward to seeing you work with dDo, had a chance to test it myself with the free alpha. It sure can help a lot in creating a convincing texture.

dDo (Legacy) is Free to use now, so no reason not to get it ^^. DDO (dDo2) is in Open Beta now for all who preordered it (edit: apparently it is open beta for everyone for free atm). I'm also looking forward to the ddo part =)

Edited June 14, 2014 by Fennek

[kiory 404]

Great bunch of tutorials, but I'd like to point out one thing.

On the high poly creation, your edgeloops are far too tight to get any real use out of your normal maps, I just want to let people know that your supporting edges should be a bit more "loose", not quite so packed together in order to get your normal maps more visible.

If they are too tight, then at certain distances they become less and less visible, and suffer from all sorts of aliasing issues. I know it's tempting to build the edges on the high poly as they appear in references, but in order to get the best baked normals the edges should be more exaggerated.

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/

This is a great article for learned and experienced artists alike, I highly recommend it. You'll want to take a look at the "Edge thickness" section to see what I'm talking about.

Anyway, great stuff, just thought I'd pass on this information.

[x3kj 1247]

As Kiory said, i had to discover that for myself as well - namely when i made the controll loops too tight it looked almost as if i hadn't done any normal at all on those hard edges - making it a waste of time to bake. I find it difficult to find the right amount of "tightness".

[soul_assassin 1723]

Great bunch of tutorials, but I'd like to point out one thing.

On the high poly creation, your edgeloops are far too tight to get any real use out of your normal maps, I just want to let people know that your supporting edges should be a bit more "loose", not quite so packed together in order to get your normal maps more visible.

If they are too tight, then at certain distances they become less and less visible, and suffer from all sorts of aliasing issues. I know it's tempting to build the edges on the high poly as they appear in references, but in order to get the best baked normals the edges should be more exaggerated.

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/

This is a great article for learned and experienced artists alike, I highly recommend it. You'll want to take a look at the "Edge thickness" section to see what I'm talking about.

Anyway, great stuff, just thought I'd pass on this information.

you are indeed right, it depends on the situation. But leaving it too loose i also don't like. Things end up looking too rounded and exaggerated.

[warlord554 2065]

Awesome material. Since you mentioned dDo. I've been working with the free version, and I don't seem to have the material presets to load into blender. Can anyone else confirm this? I assume you have to buy the full version to get the base materials needed to bake base diffuse maps?

[x3kj 1247]

Have you looked into the installation folder?

Default location is C:\ProgramData\Quixel\dDo\swatches\dDo.fbx

[da12thMonkey 1943]

you are indeed right, it depends on the situation. But leaving it too loose i also don't like. Things end up looking too rounded and exaggerated.

I don't think it's an art style that suits Arma very much anyway. The models tend to start to transition to lower LOD (some that may not even have .rvmats depending on how you optimise them), and textures are mipmapping a fair bit at the sort of mid-range distances where the edge roll-off becomes really ugly. Plus all the post-processing blur and shite. You're already subject to a bunch of other factors that are reducing the visual fidelity of the model to a much greater degree than the normal map starting to get a bit iffy.

I've always considered Arma's art style aiming to be one of the more realistic end of the scale when it comes to hard surfaces from looking at BIS' approach to normal maps, surface weathering etc. where a lot of games exaggerate it for more visual "pop". Going too soft with the edges you're sometimes left with a model that starts to look a bit "uncanny valley" when you've got it up-close in the pilot LOD or something, and doesn't reflect the tolerances that such edges are machined to IRL.

I suppose softer edges work good for structures shaped with bulk forming or sheet forming processes or manually filed e.g to very high tolerances, but to my engineering eyes it doesn't look at all good on stuff that's meant to represent cut and machined metal with low tolerances.

[x3kj 1247]

Arma 3 weapons also have a fair bit of edge roundness and i havent seen anyone complain about those yet.

You have to find the right amount of softness so it looks good on the model thats all. If you dont, the edge doesnt really catch the light like it does IRL it seems.

Edited June 17, 2014 by Fennek

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Arma 3 weapons also have a fair bit of edge roundness and i havent seen anyone complain about those yet.

And some of the weapons in the game don't appear to have normal maps baked from high-poly source meshes at all (except for perhaps floating geometry), let alone any edge roundness provided by spacing the supporting edges in a HP source mesh. Nobody complains about that either. :D

Have a look at the NOHQ files for the ABR, Kamysh, M320, Scorpion and TAR compared to those for weapons with baked normal maps like the MX, GM6, pistols etc. - you can tell that things like the ABR's normal map are generated from 2D sources rather than 3D.

As I suggested, it's an artistic choice of how hard or soft an edge can appear, and one that I personally don't think makes that much difference either way in Arma because of how assets scale off in the game world.

[kiory 404]

And some of the weapons in the game don't appear to have normal maps baked from high-poly source meshes at all (except for perhaps floating geometry), let alone any edge roundness provided by spacing the supporting edges in a HP source mesh. Nobody complains about that either. :D

Have a look at the NOHQ files for the ABR, Kamysh, M320, Scorpion and TAR compared to those for weapons with baked normal maps like the MX, GM6, pistols etc. - you can tell that things like the ABR's normal map are generated from 2D sources rather than 3D.

As I suggested, it's an artistic choice of how hard or soft an edge can appear, and one that I personally don't think makes that much difference either way in Arma because of how assets scale off in the game world.

You talk as if Arma was the first game that ever used a LOD system, well it's not and it's certainly not the best at doing so, it's outdated.

Anyway, the thing is, yes, there's a lot of objects that appears out of view in Arma, but what if they're close up and in your face? That's when things make a difference, when they are in your face, when they are directly in view. Artistic choice or not, baked normal maps are far nicer to look at than faceted surfaces.

When you deal with proper specularity, gloss and other types of maps, trust me, that's when you'll want baked normal maps, because normal run of the mill low poly hard/soft edges won't look good, not in comparison. Just look at the examples you gave for weapons, they look awful and could have been made so much better.

Have you seen Robert Hammers M4's? That's a damn fine example of what I mean, yea some people would argue that it's too clean, but that's not related to subject at hand.

Oh and DON'T GET ME STARTED ON ORGANIC SHIT, if you're gonna use 2D hand painted/stock image normals for folds and wrinkles on clothing, for skin, bone, muscles etc, then you're not doing it right, that's not artistic, that's a mess.

There's also one final thing I need to point out, which I'll be writing an article about soon, the engine itself doesn't calculate normals correctly for high poly bakes, because the low poly normals seem to still be used which shouldn't happen, anyway, you'll know what I mean when I release the article.

Aaaanyway, sorry to hijack the thread, Soul.

Edited June 18, 2014 by Kiory

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Aye I know baked normals are better than simply relying on hard/smooth vertex faceting - I wasn't arguing whether the BIS assets look okay without them, more that people don't perceive the difference between those assets and the ones that do have proper HP bakes until they are indeed up-close and in your face.

I've been commenting on how necessary having broad, exaggerated supporting edges on the HP source are compared to having making them tighter, and more realistic for a machined surface.

The broad, rounded edges work better in the mid-long range but look excessive close up and since stuff in Arma gets screwed in the mid-long range anyway (to the point that nobody notices which assets are baked and which aren't in the mid-long range). As such, I feel it's perhaps wiser to opt for the a tighter, more realistic amount of edge roundness when it comes to having those assets close up and in your face. The nice round edge roll-off is still there, just not as exaggerated.

But yea, I know what you mean about the game not reading normals exclusively from the map: Have had to split+separate UV seams and rebake a bunch of models to account for the hard faceted edges I've needed to reintroduce into models to create smoothing groups, because the vertex lighting screws everything up if you simply have everything smooth edged (single smoothing group), and per-pixel lighting from the NOHQ doesn't do the job it should in rectifying that.

[kiory 404]

You're in luck da12th Monkey, today I finally worked out the perfect workflow that doesn't require us to split uv's, I tested it earlier on my jerrycan and it worked great, gonna test it out on the ruger now and then if all works well, I'll write up some documentation on it. Hopefully you're a max user, otherwise this may be useless to you.

This process is only really exclusive to arma 3 but should work for Arma 2 as well, I wouldn't rely on it for other engines though, as normal these days are computed correctly, just not in Arma.

Edited June 18, 2014 by Kiory

[wantafanta 13]

hey is there any way i can combine multiple different textures into one sheet, so that i only have one diffused, one normal, one ambient occlusion texture etc to work with? by this i mean without re-uvmapping the model...

[kiory 404]

Basically, you cannot, because your textures need the _co, _nohq, _smdi, _as suffixes etc to work, if they were all on one sheet, then the engine wouldn't interpret them correctly.

Edited June 21, 2014 by Kiory

[wantafanta 13]

what i meant was, as my textures are currently, i have like one material for each part of the gun, with normal, diffused and specular maps and i want to just have one normal with the whole gun on it, instead of having materials i then need to apply to selections of the mesh... sorry if im not clear enough as im preatty tired after spending the past few hrs tryna get the hang of the workflow for arma.... but ofcourse buldozer doesnt wanna start for me now.. for idk what reason.. since the update its just not starting at all.. DevP seems to try to fix it but it has errors copying the files, so i guess i have to go through one by one and find wich files i need to copy over T_T

[kiory 404]

Can you give us some screen shots as an example, I'm a little confused as to what you mean.