Captain's Table Project - High Poly/ Low Poly Workflow

 High Poly/ Low Poly - Development Process

    There are certain assets that won't look well at all unless you make both a low poly version and a high poly version to bake on top of your low poly version. The reason for that being that because we try to optimize things in engine as much as we can so that our game would run more smoothly, we wouldn't want to use far too many triangles for one singular asset - for example we wouldn't want to use assets with edges that have been chamfered multiple times but in such a way that it may look pleasing to the eye at first when you're looking at the asset separately, but then in game, the player may not even notice because they probably wouldn't even go anywhere too close to it - this is something that I learned this year and it helped me learn how to optimize my scene better, which helped increase the overall FPS of my 3D environments that I've been making ever since. 

    The high poly/ low poly workflow isn't something difficult. Basically, how I do it is I model either my high poly or my low poly first, then align both one on top of another in 3Ds Max - this is crucial as they need to align perfectly in order for the bake to work in Substance Painter. Then, I export both separately (and centered in Max) and import the low poly which must have previously been unwrapped (we only unwrap the low poly) in Max. 

     If I'm just using a tiling texture, I like to bake and then apply my material straight onto my asset. Occasionally, I would add a little bit more texture to it in Substance Painter because for example, dust is something that I find quite easy to make there. I would like to credit this short tutorial that I found on YouTube that helped me quite a lot to create the material that I've been using in my scene - Burlap Fabric - Substance Designer Tutorials for Beginners - YouTube.

    I had attempted to make a similar material in the past, although I didn't really understand the Substance Designer process, neither how to bake properly. So this time around, I had a much better idea of what I'm doing.