question about blender and modeling
Saturday, September 24, 2016 - 15:01
I have never modeled before and was wondering a few things. How often are models to scale. Like if you were going to build a tavern and a knight in armor would you figure out the size of the tavern based on real dimensions or just start pulling polys until you have a model and resize it later. Wouldnt it be annoying if a game company had to resize every one of your models seperately in game. Do most people just create a model without concerns of real dimensions or scale.
Also is there such a thing as what I would refer as a "dirty model". Maybe a model that was clearly done by an amature. What would make it dirty or why would it be considered a crappy model.
Hey, I've only toyed around with Blender, so I don't have all the answers, but I do know one thing about making models that is very important and can distinguish a "good" model from a "dirty" one is the amount of vertices. Having a lot of needless vertices makes for a high poly model, which tends to be computationally inefficient. So it is often better to make fewer faces and apply smoothing with a subsurface modifier or something similar than to try to make a really detailed model. Also, making your model out of only quads seems to be the preferred way by professionals. Having tris I guess can mess with how the normals look and can cause there to be errors. Like I said, I'm not a pro, but I did get into Blender pretty heavily for about 6 months.
Thanks joth any information is helpful.
No one really answered me about scale. I walked through the shark tutorial which started with a drawing then modeled over it. it obviously didnt take any real world dimensions in creating it. In the tutorial it said to set the scale to .5. however it did not explain anything further about scale or what it meant slash is used for. I can only assume you want the scale to be the same for all the models in your project.
As far as i remember 1 blender units equal 1 meters in real life, you can also change the scaling way of measuring to be fully in decimal system.
Go to property window-> Scene tab (a ciliner and circle near a sun)-> press "Metric"
Normally you can change any scale without much problem; except if the model is a rigged and animated, if you change scales at that point it will mess everything. You have to use some tool for that like the ones from Ogre3D (Ogremesh tools i think are called), alternatively some programs like Unity dont care about scaling at all and wont give a problem.
What Joth said is also true, its better to have quads instead of tris, and clean topology, and many details can fe faked by normal maps and oclusion maps...
Malifer, if there's a real-world equivalent it does help to at least get the approximate scale right. But not all modelers worry about that for stand-alone props, cause resizing isn't too difficult for the end devs.
In my games I do try to use the 1 unit = 1 meter scale in Blender for all my 3D models.
There are a lot of things that can make a model "dirty" or amateurish. Assuming making game-ready models here.
- Shaped in an overly blocky (amateur extruder) or overly blobby (amateur sculpter) way
- Too many polys
- Not enough polys where needed (e.g. joints)
- Not sticking to quads and good topology (unnecessary tris, ngons, etc)
- Overlapping polys that are z-fighting
- Normals not facing correct direction
- Holes in the model (non-manifold), especially if you want to later 3D print or use perfect collisions
- No UV mapping
- UV seams in bad places
- UV poorly done causing texture distortion
- Poor or inconsistent quality textures
- Materials not baked and exported
- Materials missing maps usually found on a given material e.g. specular/gloss, normal, metal/roughness, ambient occlusion, cavity, height, emit, wear, etc.
- Missing armature
- Poor armature (bad deformations when bending)
- Missing animations
- Poor animations (not enough anticipation, acceleration, follow-through, squash and stretch, etc)
- Scale, Rotate, Translate isn't applied (should be at original values 1,0,0) for all objects
wow thanks Danimal and Clint. thats a lot of helpful information. It helps to know what to avoid or what bad practices are with modeling.