Re-meshing 3D Objects in Blender for FreeSO/Simitone - Tips, Tutorials and Information

mrpenguinb

mrpenguinb

Active Member
Re-meshing 3D Objects in Blender for FreeSO/Simitone

What is the process of re-meshing?
- To re-mesh an object means to make an object difference in appearance or remake it entirely

Why should I re-mesh objects? They look fine from a distance, right?
- Not necessarily, the models that have been automatically generated to make a mesh which can be very inaccurate to the original sprite.

Some Useful Shortcuts:
- Tab goes into edit mode (you should know this already)
- 1, 2, and 3 switches between face, edge and vertex selection modes while in Edit mode (Blender 2.8).
- Right-Click in Edit mode on object; this key can help you subdivide faces, edges and vertices
- Ctrl + J joins two meshes/objects together into one
- E extrudes faces, edges, and vertices
- Middle-mouse-click + LShift lets you pan across your work space
+ many more shortcuts that have their own uses!

Useful resources and tutorials:
The Official Blender Manual:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/index.html

Blender 2.8 - Beginner Tutorial Series - Blender Guru
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgEq0u2MzVgAaHEBt--xLB6U
Blender Version 2.7x: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/blender-beginner-tutorial-series

Wayward Art Company's Low Poly Modeling in Blender:
https://youtu.be/z1mrxMBtFNE

Modeling, Unwrapping and Texture painting workflow in Blender - Part 1 of 4:
https://youtu.be/IKBj2KmfNtM

Alessandro's Remeshing from Scratch Tutorial : How-To Remesh 3D Objects for FreeSO
http://forum.freeso.org/threads/3d-remeshing-basics-remeshing-an-object-from-scratch-tutorial.6294/

Free image resources:
Pexels - Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required
https://www.pexels.com/

Unsplash - Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required (although appreciated)
https://unsplash.com

CC0 Textures - Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required
(Creative Commons CC0 license)
https://www.cc0textures.com/

BlenderInsight Procedural Resources - Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required
(Creative Commons CC0 license)
http://www.blenderinsight.com/
 
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This Low Poly Asian Temple Game Asset project will help with learning how to create custom textures.
Wayward Art Company's Low Poly Modeling in Blender
It is a rather long walk-through as it also covers modeling before showing some texture painting and, finally, baking the texture in cycles with all of the lighting and whatnots
 
This 4 part series is short and simple, but very thorough and is an excellent choice as an introduction to texture painting. The model it uses is a simple low poly mushroom that is easy to model, easy to UV Unwrap and easy to paint. The 4 videos total about 45 minutes.

Modeling, Unwrapping and Texture painting workflow in Blender

Part 1 - Modeling (a low poly mushroom. Very quick and simple.)
Part 2 - UV Unwrapping (includes an explanation and discussion about UV Unwrapping. great intro to it)
Part 3 - Texture Painting part 1
Part 4 - Texture Painting part 2
 
Our FreeSO community has started posting guides, tutorials, and walk-throughs!

Chaul remeshes the office chair from to start to finish (youtube)
This youtube video is the recording of a live stream and covers exporting the generated mesh to use as a loose guide, modeling your new object, uv mapping, texturing, baking details into your texture and then removing some geometry to keep your poly count as low as possible, and, finally, saving and importing into FreeSO for testing



Alessandro's guide to re-meshing from scratch

Alessandro's forum posts cover locating and exporting an object from FreeSO, importing it into Blender, offers some tips on modeling, explains his methods for getting the best possible texture including dealing with a texture that requires using some transparency.
 
Here's a couple of sites that offer very nice stock photos for free.

Pexels.com
Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required
It's hard to understand complex licenses that is why all photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.

The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use.
You can modify, copy and distribute the photos.
All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source. So, attribution is not required.
The only restriction is that identifiable people may not appear in a bad light or in a way that they may find offensive, unless they give their consent. You should also make sure the depicted content (people, logos, private property, etc.) is suitable for your application and doesn't infringe any rights.

The CC0 license was released by the non-profit organization Creative Commons (CC). Get more information about Creative Commons images and the license on the official license page.
Click to expand...

Unsplash
All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.

More precisely, Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.
Click to expand...
 
Don't get lost in licensing plans or usage restrictions!
All assets released on CC0Textures.com fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. You can use them for any purpose, for free, forever. There is no need to give credit.

Take whatever you need!
There is no registration, no daily download limit or other restrictions!
Click to expand...

https://www.cc0textures.com/
 
A few more beginner links for learning Blender

Blender 2.8 Complete Beginners Guide
Grant Abbitt
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3ukorJv4vs_eSJUQPxBRaDS8PrVmIri
Part 1 - Interface
Part 2 - Modeling
Part 3 - Editing Meshes
Part 4 - Materials
Part 5 - The Monster (more modeling, a little more involved)
Part 6 - Rendering and Atmosphere (not as relevant to remeshing, but good to know)​

Grant Abbit has a ton of excellent videos so have a look around, but another playlist that is particularly worthy of mention is
Get Good At Blender 2.8
Exercises to Develop Your Skills

NODES​

CG Master's in-depth introduction to the Principled Shader starts off a little math-y but that is really just for the discussion on specular.
Blender 2.8 Tutorial - Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and the Principled Node

Grant Abbitt has also started a playlist on nodes. it is a much broader look at them and starts with the most basic/beginner information
Nodes for Noobs
Exercises to Develop Your Skills
 
There is a great new resource for those interested in procedural textures. He started up (posting videos) a couple of months ago and has posted his 7th video this past week. This is more advanced stuff showing how to control your procedural materials. His explanations are very easy to follow and understand. (And the shapes/projects tend to be rather fun)

Erindale on Getting Started with Procedural Textures
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVm7O9OzjT6Fu8aDrP3N1Ni1ATbUH926s

  1. Introduction to Procedural Textures - Getting Started with Blender Nodes Part 1
  2. Randomness and Tiling - Getting started with Blender nodes Part 2
  3. Radial Arrays - Getting started with Blender nodes Part 3
  4. Knitted Materials - Getting started with Blender nodes Part 4
  5. Hexagonal Tile - Getting started with Blender nodes Part 5
  6. Shape Generator - Getting started with Blender nodes Part 6
  7. The End of Tiling Repetition - Getting started with Blender nodes [part 7]
 
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While his main focus is low poly game assets, this video serves are a very thorough introduction to blender.
He demonstrates each thing fairly quickly but it a lot of things. The video description has a *very* detailed timeline.
 
Lighting Basics

Three Point Lighting

This video is a bit old, using Blender 2.8 to illustrate the lighting fundamentals.

Blender actually has a lighting templates add-on built in that you can use instead of adding the lamps manually. You may need to turn the add-on on in your preferences (I am not sure if it is on by default with newer versions of blender).
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/lighting/trilighting.html
This add-on won't be as helpful if you skip the informative fundamentals video linked above.

Lighting in Eevee
While cycles is used for baking the texture out, you'll want to be able to see a relatively similar scene when working on it in Eevee, and you may chose to use this render engine for other renderings.

Again, the old 2.8 Fundamentals Video is a great one, despite being older.

BornCG is a great channel to follow for all sorts of Blender info. This one uses Blender 3 in the video to illustrate the lighting.


ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING
Lamps are great for lighting a scene but since they are not objects in the scene, reflective surfaces do not reflect them as sources of light. You can add objects to the scene and give them emissive materials to make up for the lack of objects in your scene, giving your reflective surfaces something to work with.

Using these objects as lamps is more resource intensive than using lamps so renders take longer and the scene will be noisier, so you'll generally only want to use these as needed.
NOTE: The chocofur page says this is not the case so perhaps it is just my 'puter.


One more sophisticated approach to these types of lamps are chocofur's diy IES lighting tutorial (Cycles Only)
(Fun and lovely, but these lights create a LOT more noise, for me at least. You'll need to check out the denoiser and find a balance.)
https://learn.chocofur.com/creating-ies-lights-in-blender


FREESO CUSTOM CONTENT TIP: MATCHING YOUR 2D (SPRITES) to your 3D (BAKED TEXTURE)
One of the best ways to ensure the two match is to create the baked texture first, then create a material that uses that texture image plugged into an emissive shader. You'll want it to be an emissive shader rather than any other type because it will ignore your scene's lighting so your shadows and highlights are not doubled up.

Not at all lighting related but, for floor objects, you'll also need to remember that your object should sit at the floor level when rendering your sprites, but lower it to about -.03 on the z axis before exporting the model for FSO 3D mode.
 
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