All language subtitles for CustomMetahuman_5.4.mp4

We now have
a somewhat finished model of an outfit.

What comes next is how to make a
game-ready model out of this high poly version.

This process involves 5 steps:
Retopology,

UV unwrapping and materials set up,
baking and texturing,

rigging, and finally skinning and weight painting.

Before we do all that,

let's quickly discuss a few points
that are generally helpful to know

to make your outfit
creation experience easier.

Details...

We have already discussed
some options to add details like stitches.

This is often the question:
At which point do I start adding details?

In my workflow,
I follow a layered approach.

First, I concentrate on the big shapes
like the cloth folds and seams

and the overall silhouette of the character.
This is the stage at which we are now.

Then I usually add some medium shapes.

For example, we could sculpt additional
details on the helmets or the clothes.

And the finer details
like surface imperfections, ornaments

or wear and tear
are then taken care of by the textures.

For this outfit,
I will not sculpt any more details,

but rather refine the look of the clothes
and accessories in Substance Painter.

The next point is thickness.

Ideally, you want to have a simple mesh
for all the cloth items.

You will not only avoid unnecessary geometry,

it also makes skinning a lot easier.

However, having only one-sided clothes
meshes looks real bad when you zoom in

to your character's face.

We want our clothes to look decently
realistic and have some thickness to them.

One way to do that is to add a rim.

Let us look at the shirt, for example.

You can select the edge loop at the neck,
extrude it and then move it down.

The other option is to add
a solidify modifier,

and then tick the "Only Rim" checkbox.

For some items,

it's unavoidable to have thickness,
for example, for these belts here.

It is not optimal, but not a dealbreaker.

Don't worry about thickness too much.

It's just something to come back to

in case you run into some issues
when you are skinning your outfit.

Next: Optimization...

When modeling, we are looking
for the optimal look of the objects,

so we add multiresolution modifiers,

bevels and loop cuts,

and sometimes

we end up with a really dense topology
for rather small and unimportant items.

Also, when you added zippers
in Marvelous Designer,

you get meshes with about 6000 faces.

If you have, say,
six zipper pockets on your outfit,

it's already 36K polygons for such a minor detail.

Even though we are a bit generous
with our final poly count for the clothes,

these things are really unnecessary.
So we can use a rather aggressive

decimate modifier for such hard surface meshes.

You can try different values
for the decimation ratio

and try to find a point
where it still looks good.

On the bottom here,

you can see the poly count
you would end up with,

if you apply the modifier.

With really low ratio values,
the meshes will begin to break.

Let's also join modeled meshes
that belong together.

These two belts, for example,
don't need to be separate meshes.

But be careful. If you have different
modifiers applied to these objects,

we can't just join them
but need to apply our modifiers first.

Before we do that,

Let's select everything except the body
and move it into a new collection.

Let's call it "Hero_Clothes_High".

Then duplicate the collection and call it

"Hero_Clothes_High_modsappl"

Uncheck the original collection,
then select all and convert to mesh.

Oh, I should have deselected the shoulder pad.

Applying all modifiers will remove the hair
particle system as well.

Now we can go ahead and join meshes
with Ctrl+J.

And this leads me to the fourth point:
Organization

Nobody likes to do this, but it's always
good to rename your meshes appropriately.

If your blender project crashes

and you can't open it anymore,

(which is not a totally hypothetical scenario,
by the way),

you could append objects or collections
from the broken project to a new one.

But if you have 15 meshes called Cube001, 002 etc.,

this can become really annoying.

I also like to keep stages of the progress
in back-up collections.

Say for example, you apply all modifiers,

but later realize
you want to change something,

you always have the older
model version to go back to.

Excellent!

We have a clean and well-organized project
now and will proceed to retopology.

In the next chapter,

I will show you different approaches
to retopology of clothes items.

Those are particularly applicable to
clothes created with Marvelous Designer,

but also to any kind of high-poly mesh.

If you created your clothes using Blender,
you will probably already

have the low poly base mesh
and don't need to retopologize at all.

I will show you what you need to know
and you can judge for yourself,

how you want to proceed.