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 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.

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

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