Modeling guidelines

Constraints that apply to all assets.

The following guidelines apply to all assets. See Overview for the requirements for each piece.

Modelling

• Make every triangle count! A polygon should contribute to the silhouette or help deformations.

• Geometry has a gradient - the lowest amount of polygons being used around the feet/lower torso and the highest density around the head and upper torso.

• Avoid creating long triangles as they tend to cause shading errors

• Avoid creating very small triangles or triangles that have 0 area (all 3 vertices are at the same location) as they can generate errors.

• Add thickness to the geometry, or fill holes to avoid needing Backface Culling disabled.

The mesh at the neck is not closed, resulting in a see through hole if backface culling is enabled. This can by fixed by capping the hole in the mesh.

The Validation Tool will warn you about common issues with meshes and triangle counts.

UV mapping

• Minimize texture seams. (but use seams where hard edges are)

• Don't change the UVs of the provided body mesh.

• If possible, use fewer and bigger UV shells/islands instead of many small UV shells. Every UV split creates extra data.

• Straighten UV islands where possible, to reduce artifacts on the down-scaled textures. e.g. belts, upper & bottom of pants, ends of sleeves.

Texture baking

• The more details you bake into normal, basecolor, and other maps the better! For example, a pant pocket could be extruded from the low poly mesh, and details from the high poly mesh baked into the textures.

• Use hard edges on angles of 90 degrees or sharper. If using a hard edge, also split the UV and leave some space between the 2 split off UV islands.

To create the basecolor textures in a desirable style, we recommend:

1. Use a smart material for Substance Painter 2021 as a base: ReadyPlayerMe.spsm

2. Or: Use Color and World Space Normal maps to create a similar effect in Photoshop.

   

Benefits

• Includes AO layers so they can be adjusted separately.

• Adds a cavity map so you can control the amount of brightness and the color of edges you want to see.

• Bakes lights so you can generate simulated top illumination.

Examples of baked basecolor textures