Solium - personal research and development

kuligs2

Damn, 23 days later.. went back to my old statemachine.. cant make anything better for now.. and just wasting time rewriting the same thing that dont work the way i expect it to work.

Next im working on lights textures and environments.

Does anyone know how to fix the color bleed?

This is how it looks in blender.. the bottom is one color the rest is another.. same material..

Using default environment

And one directional light in the scene, forgot why its there.

kuligs2

Man.. another one of those things where i feel like a blind man at an orgy - "you have to feel things out" in order to find what youre looking for..

Turns out had to set this on the mesh "manually" to dynamic

Before

After

but now everything looks different.. hmm.. now need to set back all the other options i messed with and start over the process of "feeling things out" to make it look like something that a game would have used..

kuligs2

So here are my findings so far. Playing around with directional light3d and world environment didnt fix the "splotchy" / "dirty" looking shadows.

Somehow it turns out that low poly actually looks worse than high poly mesh.

I got 3 creations.

Left is super dense, sculpted. 420k faces
Mid is super low poly. 38 faces
Right is low poly but many subdivisions. 9.7k faces

Color accuracy in godot, i havent figured it out yet.. now im dealing with shadows first.

Engine default environment looks normal minus the colors

In my world:

The corner:

The inner wall:

going super low poly is not allowed i guess 🙁

Now testing how many faces/subdivisions i need to make it look good.
x0 - 38 faces = black
x1 - 152 faces = blue
x2 - 608 faces = green
x3 - 2.4k faces = red
x4 = purple

Well.. It seems that 10k faces or x4 subdivision looks good while being "low poly".. shame.. i was hoping to have very very low poly type meshes and it would look good..

kuligs2

OK so more testing...
Tried the plugin
https://github.com/TokisanGames/Sky3D

Which comes with nice cloud shader and variables that you can use to change day time and sunset etc etc.. very handy. Also it comes with default world environment.

I forgot if it had SDFGI enabled or not, but i enabled it.
Also i forgot to save my blend file with meshes from last post, and duplicated them meshes. Now the first from left is high poly mesh and all other except the last on the right are the same low poly. And the last orange one is subdivided x2.

So, today i cant reproduce the shadow smearing.

There might be smearing at the top of "lintel" but its due to that it overlaps other faces.

But there is still smearing on one of my meshes that is not regular/rectangular but low poly

So idk..

One thing to note that in order to stop light bleed, your mesh has to have faces oriented inside (red on the inside of the room)

I tried with clean mesh - cube -> cut out middle and fill faces so that it makes a shipping container with bot ends open

And i have no smearing of the shadow.

Maye my hastely made mesh was borken is some unapparent way.. need to be careful when creating faces/meshes so that its all connected and water tight and faces are oriented in correct way

And that the mesh is thick enough so that the light does not bleed through

kuligs2

So im starting to practice modelling, turns out its not that easy to make something that looks the part but also is composed with as little faces as possible.

Any suggestion on how to model your models and set them up for efficiency?

My idea was to use One material in godot that maps UVs of the model to correct color (solid colors)
But this means i have to model each small detail like each rivet and stuff like that to be able to color them.

Now im rethinking maybe i should use materials with baked textures, each item will have its own material and thing like that..

The second one is still missing the lock and rivets and hinges..
What do you guys suggest from experience?

MikeCL

kuligs2 The second image is definitely more "game-friendly", the first one looks more like a higher-res model used for texture baking.

first question might be, how will the player see the chest? And what kind of specs are you targeting. Is it meant to be more realistic or toon looking?

I would rely more on normal maps for extruding and smaller details. For example, the wooden planks and the bolts could easily be baked on a normal map. Then spend more polygons on making the shapes hold up in silhouette, for example, the top lid could use more polygons to make the arching shape rounder.

Dad3353

For Items scattered around the Scene, I use relatively small Png files, made as a mosaic from larger, more detailed, images, and apply these to the item concerned. Blender does a very good job of manipulating UV's to suit. Here, as a current example, is a screenshot of Items that can be found in my Dungeon, and the single, 1024x1024 Png file with all of the textures, including a colour palette along the bottom. I have the possibility of using either 32 colours, plus Metallic, Roughness and Emissive each, or 128 colours, all with 0.5 Metallic and Roughness (this suffices for most of my Objects...)...

Texture image...

Screenshot of Items...

I would not model rivets and stuff for games; only for detailed 3D stuff that will be inspected closely and manipulated (working valve gear on a stem loco, for example...), and even then rarely. Photo-textures would be far more efficient. Hope this helps.

kuligs2

MikeCL Im figuring this out, and trying to find/train myself to good practice. At first i wanted to use simple one material for all and by just changing colors for each face /detail of the mesh. But i came to realisation that adding details will cost me more faces on the mesh and thus more compute needed in game later on.

I thought instead of having 100x textures and 100x materials made in godot engine i would use one material so that it would be more performant..

So now im rethinking and maybe just use the old method of making high poly model, then bake texture and then remesh the the hi-poly model to low-poly and create material for the object.

Now im confused how would you bake like different types of materials like wood/glass/metal into one texture?... hmm need to test this.. i think i remember how but havent done this for long..

Ok as i remember you bake textures that produce 3 types of images - normal - color - metal (i think thats how it was in blender)

But then how do you recreate that material in godot?
Do you just use one material (ChestMaterial) and just plug in these 3 texture bitmaps into the godot thingies and it would look good or something? Or do you need to create for each material type - wood/glass/metal separate material in godot?

Dad3353 Same question for you too

Dad3353

The first image is the single file used for all of the items in the second image, and this same file will serve for may ten times as many items, finally. I've just finished modelling a couple of Keys, for instance, to be picked up by the Player; these keys use this same Texture file.
I never bother with Normal mapping, nor Specular, Height etc, as it really doesn't show at all in the games I make. I'm not fond of a 'Toon' look; I'd rather get close to a simili-photo effect, albeit less detailed. Rivets and wood grain have enough effect, for me, from just a decent Albedo Texture file.
Here's a Box of Fish, using a 512x512 Png file only, giving a decent-enough '3D' look from any angle for my needs...

MikeCL

kuligs2 You would definitely want to use 1 material for the entire object if possible (having lots of different materials is bad for performance). In your case, I don't see why you would need more. So you have 1 material for the entire object, then you use texturing to determine the surface quality. For this you will need to unwrap your model.

A minimum standard for a more realistic surface would include the following:

Albedo - just colors for the surface. Is it dark, light, brown, blue, does it look like wood...etc.
Roughness - How much should the surface be reflective. Higher values, the rougher the surface (less reflective)
Metal - Is it a metallic surface or not. A lot of times this is usually either black or white (metallic or non-metallic surface).

Then there's some extra surface textures you can use such as normalmaps (to fake a higher resolution and have more details), Occlusion.. etc. And with Occlusion, Roughness and Metal, those are also usually in 1 file, RGB = Occlusion, Roughness, Metal (ORM). This is also done for performance (less file reads/transfer). But might be a bit overkill for now if you are still learning the basics.

Then there might be special cases where you would want to have specialized materials. In some cases, a glass material could be separated.

kuligs2 Now im confused how would you bake like different types of materials

Just to explain what "baking" means. Baking mostly refers to transferring data from 1 object to another. In games it's very common that you have a high-resolution model with tons of polygons (like a digital sculpture from Zbrush) that you "fake" surface data from highres model to a normalmap. So the game engine can use the normal map to estimate how light behaves and reflects off a low-poly surface to make it look more high-res than it actually is.

And if the high-res model has textures, those could also be transferred to the "game" model through a "baking" process.

So in your case, I would probably worry less about the baking process, and look more for how your model unrwapping and textures look like. I think that "baking" is a process that is more relevant if you have a high quality/highres mesh you want to transfer data from to a game ready model.

Dad3353

Here is a Blue Ant, Animated and Textured in Blender, using one 256x256 Jpg, .5 Metallic, .5 Roughness, and that's all. The Glb was imported (drag'n'drop...) into Godot, and a Scene created from that. The Texture and Animation followed automatically in Godot. I have Jpg files of other colours, and can swap Textures 'on the fly', but prefer to change the Texture file and save a fresh Scene with the new colour.
I don't 'bake' anything, in Blender nor in Godot. If I use Metallic, Roughness or Emissive files along with the Albedo file, my procedure is exactly the same (drag'n'drop into Godot, where they are immediately recognised...).
The detailing is in the Albedo file, to give the effect wanted. No Normals, nor extra Meshes. Here's the Blue Ant Albedo file...

...and an animation render from Blender of the Blue Ant Walking...

That's as much detail I need for the Dungeon I'm making; I have over 60 different beasts of all sorts in the dungeon, all animated, with dozens on screen at any one time. Godot doesn't seem to be troubled by any of this (I have a quite modest PC and video card...). I tend to do things in a rather simple manner, not being able to do anything else. It's enough for my needs; others may, and surely will, do things in a more sophisticated way. Hope this helps. :-)
(The 'Gif' file was converted from the original 'Mkv' file, with quite some loss of quality, as the source file is not allowed for upload, apparently. Sorry. Heres a link to a U-Tube video...
Blue Ant Walking

kuligs2

Dad3353 Looks cool, but i have a question.. when you say you didnt bake anything, then how did you get the unwrapped texture for the model?

The texture baking is that you (as i understand) you unwrap faces as they are with whatever blender materials you have set on them and then the baking process "takes screenshot" or "paints" over the color data and other data in the shape of your unwrapped data.. and then you can use that texture as you have shown for your model.

Gowydot

kuligs2

For Blender/Godot:
UV unwrapping is just to flatten out object polygons so you can see all the faces at once, which makes it easy for texturing a 3D object.

When you UV unwrap you will also create an image file to be used as a "canvas" image for your object.

This canvas image file can either be just a color/transparent image or another image file like bricks_pattern.jpg or apple_skin.jpg..etc. This is where you can "paint" it over and resave it as your new object's texture.

At this point you don't need texture baking. Godot can import your 3D object + this new texture image file.

So what if you don't just "paint" over your image. You use several of Blender's nodes to manipulate your textures, changing UV coordinates, procedural generating pattern on top of this canvas image. These extra Blender nodes results can't be imported into Godot. You'd then need to do the baking of this material setups you have.

Baking is to convert this material setups into an image file, basically "screenshot" how it currently looks into a single image. You can then export this object + image to Godot.

Dad3353

This fellow does a Good Job of explaining UV maps, and modelling in general; might be worth looking into his videos and courses, maybe..?

U-Tube video : How to UV-Unwrap anything...

kuligs2

Alright, been few weeks since last progress..
So, i have learned that i havent learned much..

As i dove in to 3D modelling i thought its gonna be easy but its not that easy when you dont know what youre doing.
The objective was to make something that has least ammount of faces, but it was hard without knowing what details would be visibly important or not.
I havent dove into texturing and stuff.. im sure i could shrink the ammount of faces when i properly texture the model.

So 8 iterations later, i got here

Now getting this animated was interesting too.

Simple animations
Open and close and shake

I made separate actions for open/close/shake then baked into new actions where one or more action is mixed together.

Next step was adding this to godot.
Soon you will realise that this method i have chosen to do things is a failure. Who could have known..

As you can see that the imported chest has no collision shapes so i had to add them manually.
One cylinder and few boxes.

But later on i found out you cant animate collision shapes, so when the chest lid is swung open it is outside the collision shape.

What a bummer.

The only way is to create separate objects, such as bottom part and lid part then recombine them together in godot and add script that animates. Either with hinges or some other way.

The chestbox script

extends RigidBody3D

class_name ChestBox

@onready var animation_player: AnimationPlayer = $"chest-08/AnimationPlayer"

enum BoxState {
	Closed,
	Open,
	Transition
}

var curr_box_state:BoxState = BoxState.Closed

func _ready() -> void:
	
	animation_player.animation_finished.connect(_on_anim_finished)

func open_box():
	
	if curr_box_state == BoxState.Closed and curr_box_state != BoxState.Transition:
		curr_box_state = BoxState.Transition
		animation_player.play("ChestOpenCombined")

func close_box():
	
	if curr_box_state == BoxState.Open and curr_box_state != BoxState.Transition:
		curr_box_state = BoxState.Transition
		animation_player.play("ChestCloseCombined")

func shake_box():
	if curr_box_state == BoxState.Closed and curr_box_state != BoxState.Transition:
		curr_box_state = BoxState.Transition
		animation_player.play("Shake")
		
func _on_anim_finished(animation):
	match animation:
		"ChestOpenCombined":
			curr_box_state = BoxState.Open
		"ChestCloseCombined":
			curr_box_state = BoxState.Closed
		"Shake":
			curr_box_state = BoxState.Closed

Simple functions that i can trigger from other events.

Result is this.

But not the result i want to achieve.

What i want to solve is:

When chest is kicked around chest handles move around like physics bones. Sways around when moved.
Chest lid move the collision shape with animation.

What i want to figure out how to make "good enough" materials /textures for the model so that i can decimate the mesh and make it super simple but still look good 🙂.

And the cherry on top, create destructible object where mesh explodes on request.

Tomcat

kuligs2 And the cherry on top, create destructible object where mesh explodes on request.

https://github.com/Jummit/godot-destruction-plugin

Dad3353

kuligs2

One may create a collision shape for the 'lid closed' scenario, and have a second collision shape, suitably placed, for the 'lid open' scenario. Activate/disactivate the shapes as appropriate when the lid opens. Any help..?

kuligs2

Tomcat i thought about this, but then in the current chest example im not sure if its a good idea. The cell fracture would be reasonable to use on stone types, but on metal im not sure..

I guess i have to create broken up meshes and then upon destruction replace mesh with broken up mesh and apply physics to it with an impulse..

Need to experiment to understand if this is what i imagine it to be.

kuligs2

Dad3353 not the effect i was looking for, as i want dynamics.. meaning if its being animated and animation plays it interacts with environment.. feels more alive that way.. so if the chest is face down and lid is opening up the lid pushes the chest or something like that..

And as you say, you can animate the lid collision position overtime.. but its tedious.. imagine having 100x different chests to be made and this is just too much work.. there has to be a smart way to set it up.

kuligs2

So, another experiment with texture painting and baking textures + custom unwrap

Was following this tutorial

Took me few hours of tinkering, but looks doable with my skill set
In blender

In godot

Kinda interesting mechanic of barrel surfing is being discovered 😃

Alright, this is more like what i was looking for as to asset creation.. few ammount of faces, and every other detail is painted on.. looks "good enough"..

UCUpaint is actually very powerful and useful. Dealing with materials in blender for hard coded materials maybe its fine but when you need to mix them up or paint them on as decals or details, it gets hairy real quick..

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