Rattan Rocker | A Complete Game Asset Workflow

We will define the wooden body of the horse, using a spline/curve-based modeling technique that will provide a non-destructive workflow to ensure easy, flexible modeling.

Once the body has been created, we will look at developing the meshes for the wicker pieces that connect all of the wooden cylinders. We will use a modifier-heavy approach to design, which is going to carry most of the modeling work to make our lives easier, and more able to adapt to new obstacles should they arise.

With our initial geometry completed, let's quickly look at closing out any gaps we may have and finalize our design to begin the UV unwrapping process!

UV unwrapping can be quite a confusing and time-consuming process, however it is a critical step towards achieving great textures. This episode will showcase how we can make the process a little bit easier for ourselves by using the free TexTools add-on (link provided in the resources of "Project Setup" video), as we begin to define our unwraps and straighten any potential stretched and distorted UVs.

Once we've defined our unwraps, we will need to consolidate them onto a 0 - 1 texture set that we could use for a game. Using both free add-ons we've downloaded, we will look at some things to look for when dealing with unwraps and how we can try to maximize our texture space by intelligently mirroring duplicated information to increase texel density.

This episode will cover preparing our mesh to be exported for texturing and ultimately implementation into a game engine. Many things can secretly go wrong when exporting a mesh, so we will look at ways you can navigate this process and things to look out for.

To start our first material, we will look at developing a convincing "plain weave" pattern for our height map.

Using our height map, let's look at how we can further develop this material by adding colour, roughness, normals and ambient occlusion.

Building off of our plain weave material, we will borrow some height information to quickly make a separate wicker strap material.

Our final material will be a generic polished wood that we will be able to use for the horse body. Let's take a look at defining its height map.

Drawing on the information taken from the height map, let's finalize this material's outputs and look at extending a few parameters for use in Substance Painter.

Now that our materials are completed, we will need to export them into an appropriate format to be used for texturing in Substance Painter.

Let's take a moment to quickly bring in our meshes and set up our materials in our Painter shelf.

Using our plain weave and wicker strap materials, let's go ahead and begin texturing our asset by blocking out our rattan materials.

With our wood material, let's quickly block in our wood pieces and ensure that the directionality of our wood grain is consistent.

To close out our texturing, let's try to unify our material blockouts by adding some uniform weathering and extra details that will help consolidate the look and feel of our asset.

With our texturing complete, let's set up a texture export template that we can re-use for any future projects we may bring through Substance Painter.

Let's now take a look at adding some more straps to the ankles of our asset, updating its UVs to use the same texture set that we've just created.

Using the same technique from the previous episode, let's develop the connector straps for the head of the horse.

To greatly reduce the poly-count of our asset, we will look at bringing it through a manual retopology process to have maximum control over the final poly-count.

Using Blender, let's set up a scene where we can render out a shot of our rocking horse.

Alternatively, let's take a look at rendering our rocking horse out in Marmoset Toolbag 4.

Thank you so much for taking a look at this course! If you have any questions, comments or concerns make sure to let me know in the comments section of each video.