Thanks for having me on this one!

Great tutorial, just one note though. When channel packing, something I've seen more often is the ARM order; it's simply the order correlation between RGB and the metallic, AO, and roughness. The ease of memorizing the acronym ARM is probably why it's used more often for industry standards. It's often just called an ARM map. ARM->RGB (AO to red | Rough to green | Metallic to blue).

you might've made the most helpful texture baking tutorial I've ever seen for blender. thank you

dude that channel packing tip is genius

Very helpful, baking is always a pain in the butt. The sharpen trick is really nice too!

You can also pack ambient occlusion into the tangent space normal map by simply scaling the normal by AO. You wouldn't even need to unpack it, because any lighting calculations would inherently scale with the dot product of the normal as long as you don't re-normalize it. Some game engines can be tricked by that and effectively give you AO without specifying an AO map or using an AO capable shader at all. Also, for very flat, shiny surfaces (polished coins, mirrors etc.) an 8 bit per channel normal map doesn't cut it because you see banding appear in the normals. In that case, you can just pack nX and nY in a single texture, but use two color channels for each, effectively making it a 16 bit fixedpoint value. The z-coordinate then has to be recovered by sqrt(1 - nX^2 - nY^2) Keep in mind that your baked texture don't all need to be of the same size. While it maybe tempting to bake AO together with metalness/roughness, there are many cases where you need a much higher resolution for metalness than for AO - so it would make sense to factor out the AO map or use the above trick for baking it into the normal map. If your textures are more of a cartoonish flavor where you have lots of sharp stylized features, make sure that all straight lines in your texture run parallel to the image borders in UV space - even if that means a sub-optimal UV unwrap. If any high-contrast lines in texture space run at an angle, you wll see magnification artifacts in form of the well known "vasarely squares". These don't show up if the magnified line is straight in texture space. With clever texture layout, you can completely eliminate those artifacts and get away with a very much reduced texture resolution. Lastly, you may want to check whether your engine supports object space or even world space normal maps.Tangent space normal maps are actually meant to be used for animated objects or in case you need to apply a repeating pattern to a non-planar surface. You don't gain anything with tangent space normals when you're baking them and your object doesn't animate or deform. In those cases, object space normal maps are way faster because they don't need the engine to set up a tangent space frame at every vertex. They also don't suffer from any tangent space related ambiguities like texture space winding order, degenerate UVs or topological singularities.

Thanks, as a self punishing perfectionist I wrongly thought a model had to be made from one watertight perfect quad mesh. I should unlearn thinking like that lol.

It's INSANE how many useful tips you've managed to fit into this one 10 minute video. Genuinely, I've been doing 3D modeling and game development for years now and I haven't been able to learn or figure out most of the stuff in this video.

This model can be optimized for a game even more, removing all greebles and grids and translating them to baked normal map. It will look just the same as with actual geometry. For open grids alpha channel transparency can be used. Also, baking 2K maps is much faster than 4K.

Channel Packing is something that always confused me, I could never get my head around it, but this explains the process perfectly, thank you.

One tip, you can denoise a noisy ambient occlusion using the compositor, much like using the diamond sharpen node, just with the denoise node instead. Another thing that I like to do when using the compositor to edit an image is to plug the result to the compositor viewer instead of render output. This way I don't have to set the render resolution the same as the input image, altough it does need a bit of extra step after pressing render, and that is switching the view to viewer node.

Fantastic video! This baking info will help a lot. Your approach to showing and not just telling is great. If you were to get a chance to do so, a similar approach to explaining your procedural texturing would be a dream vid for me. It’s a struggle sometimes!

finally a gamedev related video, this might be the most useful video you've ever done on this channel.

The texture bake explaining was so well and easy thanks alot!

golden production level, down to the point, well written, understandable. good

Really great tutorial, thanks for sharing!

Bunch of DOPE tricks. Thanks ❤

amazing tutorials you have shared thanks a lot CG Cookie🙏

Wow, I've always used the selected to active trick, never knew this way. Subscribed!

Well this solves the mystery of the channel separation nodes i see in purchased assets. Thank you!

Hey Riley ! Wow ! Thanks for this ! I will definitely consider, buying this course from you, when i want to get serious with modeling myself. Much expertise of yours, going into these 3 Minutes of video! And it's nice and quiet at the same time. No music, that would cover your valuable explanations. Thanks a lot. Greetings from germany, europe, earth 🌏🥰

Super lucid, expertly delivered - thank you Riley!

Finally something on game assets again! Wonderful video :)

Just something i wanted to mention regarding the cut tool you used at 0:59 i always use the edge collapse and delete edge loop to terminate loops where possible, there are some clicks to be saved, those work fine instead of the cut tool for the kinda thing you were doing in the vid :)

wow was this one of the best game asset tutorials on the internet. great job.

Loved the sharpening tip, thanks

something about a good optimized mesh is just so beautiful to see

Awesome Tut!!! Thanks!

great short Tips. thx... renderer Cycle baking settings is also big impotant part and hassle spot ... color space too...special f. beginners... hope you can bring light to that too

I think this is one of best videos I've seen about baking. Thanks for sharing!

That's great tips... thank you guys !!!

Very nice tutorial - thank you very much for sharing :).

I was totally unaware that you can use one image, copied over multiple materials, to bake each separate material into a single map. My process would have been to copy the object, create a new material for the new one, and then go for a Selected to Active baking method (which I notice it sucks most of the times).

The most useful video for 3D artists!

Thank you, great tips. ❤

Will there be a tutorial on this TV? A very interesting part of the procedural texturing of this prop.

It was very helpful, and Baking increases performance.😉

Great video! Thanks.

You can also make the vents a 2d plane with a transparent texture like they do with fences

The antenna junction above flat surface introduces possible surface Z-fighting. Separate high detail grill insert introduces T-Junctions, so it's best to extend it somewhat so geometry pieces overlap and obscure a crawling dots line, but that too can cause Z-fighting. It depends, sometimes in a game engine for a given game design it may be impossible to set a suitably far nearplane to suppress Z fighting well enough, it would necessitate modelling which isn't prone to these issues, where the topo is cohesive. On the flip side no game engine ever objects against triangulated, decimated models. The quad topology is for your modelling/modification purpose only, and there are topos which are not editor friendly but render absolutely beautifully, think icosphere sections. Oh also long skinny polygons kill ROP bandwidth. If you are triangulating a circle, and really care about its bandwidth consumption (you don't always care), make a big triangle in the middle and arrange smaller ones around it, this way the bulk of the area has no quad overhead. Rendering occurs in 2x2 pixel quads, where whether 4 pixels are occupied in a given triangle or just one pixel, it takes the same time, so it pays to minimise total polygon perimeter and populate the bulk of the area with few polygons.

Yesss, I can finally use my procedural mats in peace. Thank you!

That sharpen trick is really great!

super useful video! thanks so much

insane cool ! thank you !

Excellent and concise video.

I would love to see a course or tutorial maybe on how you did the texturing, because i am always interested in how someone would make something like that without using Substance Painter

Awesome Tips!

Perfect thank you!!

Thank you!

Would love to add this isn't the only way to optimize for games! There is trim sheets, texture atlases, & tiling textures that can also greatly reduce draw calls and texture memory usage. Those of you wanting to dive deeper should look into those concepts as well! It's counter intuitve but sometimes when building larger scenes its better for an object to have 4 different materials on it (yes that increases draw calls) but its countered by the fact that 50 other objects in the scene also use those same for materials. Thus reducing the total drawcalls for a scene rather then every small object using their own materials / baked textures

this is super useful. would love to see more like this

Good tut!

thank you for this.

Finnaly! someone explaining this how to bake a Texture.

Awesome video, I am curious about terrain/environment creation and optimization for games in blender.

Expecting more videos related to Game Dev.

Wow, so good!!!

Great tutorial, Thank you.

6:25 Here, why do we set it to emit instead of diffuse? Isn't diffuse specifically for the base color?

I request you to make a detailed procedural texturing tutorial of this Television set.

As a developer I would have the baking occur automatically on loading the asset. Easy way to save the artist some precious hours in the long run.

wow, that was really easy to digest and insightful. Thanks a lot. I'm saving this for future reference hehe

Thanks for this! Just one question, do we triangulate before unwrapping or just before baking (thinking UE auto lightmaps matching so those verts in such don't change down the line.).

3:14. Makes total sense. I can work much faster with meshes separated but on the same UV.

the sharpen part... is so damn smart...

How important is it to create a high poly model first and then baking from that? Especially for the normal maps, that should give better details in the final model

This is good, but also very time consuming. In Substance, i can just paint and export and the softqare does all the manuall stuff for me. I like that this stuff can be done solely in Blender to a VERY high quality.

Beethoven, 7th Symphony, 2nd Movement at 00:42 ? Good video ;)

Are the topology changes necessary if you are using nanite in ue5?

Please can you cover how you textured this model

For the vent, would it be better to make an alpha channel with it and just kinda "cut" out the vents and just make it all a texture?

please make more game creation using blender....because i am quite interested in this development recently

Hey loved the video, mind sharing the texture file?

please could you make tutorial on how you textured this model

Tooop....Thank you!!!

You should probably make sure you bake the data textures as linear and not sRGB, they will break or just be generally worse quality in your game engine otherwise.

So you export 4k maps but use 2k for game engines? If so, how does the quality of the image hold up? Does the sharpening tip you shared come through when scaling down the image or does it depend which image format we use (jpeg, jpg, png...) when baking and saving?

first time hearing about channel pack

It's Awesome

That model is insanely realistic

Nice tutorial. Just didn't get the point of baking the color as an emission texture instead of a simple diffuse one

Doing it this way doesn't require you unplugging metallic node. Cool.

Nice, there is not enough Blender to game engine tutorials out there !!

What is the music in the end of the video?

and how do i use the channel pack in the game engine?

Amazing tutorial - But for the love of all that is holy, WHY THE MUSIC???? ( still subscribed fyi )

But why triangulate? Is there some benefit from keeping them all quads ?

Ничего не понял, но очень интересно!

2:12 wow, how did you move that so precisely and fast?

strange music at the end... oddly inspiring

how did you slide that antenna ontop the surface that fast? I'm doing it manually and it's not perfect even.

Sharpening: Certainly a brilliant idea, but: How do you make the image appear - when I drop an image into the compositor: Nothing happens - what now?

What is a easier to het better topology less tris

I'd like to know the name of the music used in the video.

Making a model into multiple meshes won't cause performance issue?

Awe video

A few tips, don't bake your channel packed map, or any map besides base color, as sRGB, you want those to be linear textures, or you will get incorrect results in game engines. Also, why did you bake a normal map without a parent mesh to get normal data from?

Can someone give me a concrete answer about this: ive been told triangles in modeling and Retopology are very, very bad. Yet i see tons of models online, and sketchfab that use them. NEARLY ALWAYS on hard surface, and sometimes on organic, but near like, the top of the head or places away from the mouth, like inside eye sockets and inside the mouth, places that wont be animated. So my qiestion is: are triangles really bad or not? Is using them a Sin? Will my models be spit upon and i be laughed at for using them?

👍👍👍

You textured the entire thing PROCEDURALLY and using ONLY BLENDER??? How? :D