Simple Game Ready Asset Creation in 3D Coat

Asset planning can be a crucial step and save a ton of time and energy in the long run. Here, we'll cover why it is important to think through the asset from the standpoint of what we're going to sculpt and how we'll best approach it.

Generating art, no matter how simple it may seem often starts with forms and primitives, especially in the 3D modeling world. This technique saves time in getting most of your model started and ready for sculpting and painting further details.

Before we topologize our asset, we'll want to sculpt in any details we want baked onto our textures, prior to painting. These details are ones we're most worried about the resolution of our texture maps affecting. This lecture will hone in details most important to our asset.

Planning the topology of your asset, prior to creating it can save time. It also helps to know ahead of time what we're intending to do with the asset, whether it be for animation or creating a modular piece. We'll discuss these concepts during this lecture.

UV unwrapping can be very difficult to do in most software. I find that 3D Coat is extremely powerful and makes this task very easy. We'll cover what tools are best to perform this task in 3D Coat.

Projecting high-level details onto a low-poly asset can also be a very difficult task. 3D Coat make this a breeze, as long as you know what settings to choose for your intended purpos(es). Here, we'll go over this process and how to get our asset ready for painting in further details.

Just as we planned our asset and it's topology, we want to think through how best to stylize our textures. Is this a realistic asset or a cartoon-like one? Is it going to be seen close up by the player or further away? What resolution do our textures need to be at? What kind of texture maps are we interested in producing? Finally, how do we do this in 3D Coat? All of these questions and more will be answered here.

You're in the home stretch for creating your asset, so let's get painting! This can be super easy in 3D Coat, as long as you know the major tools can do and how best to utilize them. Learn useful techniques and tools in this video to get us started.

Continuing with our painting, we need to consider how best to approach a multi-part asset. This can be tricky, unless you know what to expect. Here, we'll talk more about how to handle these problems.

Finalizing our texture creation, we're close to exporting our asset. Let's take some time to do the finishing touches on our work.

Baking textures is, again, really easy in 3D Coat. What considerations should we take into account with our asset to make it game-ready? How will we export our textures? What engines or applications will our asset be imported into and what formats should our textures be? We'll look into all of this and more in this lecture.

Unity is one of the most popular game engines. If you haven't already figured this out, importing an asset into Unity is extremely easy. We'll take this concept a little further, during this lecture.

The Unreal Development Kit (UDK) is arguably the most popular and renowned game engine. Here, we'll take a look at how to get our asset into the game engine and take into various considerations that can save us difficulty later on.

As a bonus, I decided to add a lecture on getting our asset into Marmoset. Marmoset is a great tool for creating beauty shots for our portfolio, but how do we get our asset and textures into Marmoset in the first place? Let's see...

A well deserved Thank You letter to my students.