Thread by @delaneykingrox

Okay #gameart folks, I was donated these two tweezers from a VR project to demonstrate some cleanup and good topo.
Big thanks to the contributor, who gets the model back cleaned up as a thanks. :)

Are ya ready for this?

Okay, so here is the topology, and, as you can see, this is far from ideal. Both artists here are from film, so they are just learning the ropes for games- and again, they donated these so give your thanks

Okay, so lets start with the brief. These are for VR.

Now VR means you can get the tool very, very close to your face. It also means normal maps are not going to create much of an illusion of detail.

So we are aiming for a decent finish in VR.

Here is the first location we can make a savings. The teeth are needed, however the subdivisions run down though the model.
The tweezers need to pinch together, but they dont need more than that. We can really take this down

But lets start with the low hanging fruit. There are a lot of loops that do not contribute to the shape at all. So we can blast those straight away

So that takes us from 1641 tris down to 1247

This is where the real fuckery starts. I am going to blow these away.

And then re-orient the edges so those little triangles are actually triangles.

Looks ugly, but the tapering of the tweezer dictates at least five divisions

Epstein didn't kill himself.

And with the polys I saved, I added a bevel and face weighted normals. This will light well in VR.

See how it catches the light? No baking needed

So here is the wire now. 666 tris. Face weighted normals.

Now the UVs. I added a few edges and merged a few to allow sharing of uvs from one arm to the other.

I use as few shells as possible to keep my UV count down, but break up the long parts into chunks that allow me to maximise the use of texture space.

The texel density is the same all along the tweezer, and the other side has no uvs. I will mirror them later.

Bonus trick. So, this is one tool in a range of tools in the game. They all use the same logos and... well, wouldn't it be nice if we had huge, crisp text on all of them and shared that data?
Also, on the mirrored side we want the logo flipped.

Enter 2nd UV channel!

Okay, so in my shader, channel 0 will lay down some metal from one set of textures.
Uv Channel 1 references a second map, that has all the logos and text on it.

And the final score is....

Or, in UV terms, I get four of mine to one of the original.

I also get...
nice edge highlights
each of the teeth catch the light.
My logo will be super high res.
My uvs cover approximately five times the surface area of the original.

You can see the highlights catch here.

Tips for tricks?

ko-fi.com/dellak

Tweeze

heh. Wood.

TWEEZERS: JJ ABRAMS EDITION

The seam between the metal I added dynamically.

That way I can dial it up or down, make it thicker or thinner- non destructively.

Okie dokie folks. Hope that helped. I am off to bed. :)

Why this pole?
It allows the face weighted normals to distribute smoothly around the rim. For the cost of an extra triangle, the normals fan nicely towards the middle.

As you see, that area is flawless, and the bevel crisp all the way around.

You will learn to control normals like this with experience. It's an art.

Why the gap? The uvs are laid out to the metal grain, so it can be tiled in the shader and combined with baked maps.
If I turned one sideways to fill the gap the grain would be wrong....

By tiling the fine textures, I can reduce the baked maps by one eighth the size x normal, ao/roughness/metallic, albedo.

So I lose some uv space but I gain much, much higher res textures with smaller maps.

This is for VR, so it can, in theory get up inches from your face.

If this was for, say, a PC Fps game, I would push the count way down and bake on the ridges with a normal map.