ok, my last post for awhile. I been trying to figure out a workflow and I’m so confused. It’s been 1 year 5 months since I started on this quest to do something with my life. I wrote 3 books that I wanted to turn into games. I am 34 years old and disabled, I have sma and wanted to leave something behind for my family to be proud of me. I maxed out my credit cards buying( mari and modo indie, substance designer and painter) thinking that is all I need but guess what? I have not yet made one thing in all this time. You may ask why? well because I have not found one video to help with modo indie workflow…every video uses scripts and indie cant use scripts. I cant figure out what tool to use for texturing because EVERYONE uses something different! I cant afford digital tutors or collage. I can model ANYTHING and I can UV map…But I cant figure out uv maps for lightmaps, smoothing groups or making collition meshes, I cant figure out baking maps OR making LODs…I cant afford Max and ue4 and everyone uses Max Or maya for gaming it seems. CAN anyone just be a friend and make me ONE video that shows me this ( 1. Making a Cobble Road OR Victorian street lamp OR a small House for first person type 4th gen games. 2. Using what I got. I need to see how you setup MODO indie 901 to be used for UE4. 3. HOW you make smoothing groups in MODO 901 4. Making the light maps. 5. Making Collition meshes in MODO 901 (Indie) 6. Baking maps (I know how to go low to high poly ect…) in MODO 901 7. How to make LODs in MODO 901 and export all this to UE4…8. What program to use for texturing???
I’m tired of googling, and youtubing this ONLY to find out dated stuff that DONT work in 901 indie (No scripts)…Please help…Its my last go at this before I give up …Mari , substance designer/painter and modo do textures…what the hell is the best? I’m so confused on it…
For a cobblestone road, the best application would be substance designer. It’s designed to create 2d tiling textures really well. The first thing you want to do in Substance is create a convincing height map, which you will use to create the normal map, from where, you’ll build upon that to get your base color and roughness.
For a street lamp, you will want to create a block out in Modo, followed by the high poly model, and then the low poly mode. You’ll bake out textures feed into either Substance Painter or Mari to create your final textures. Substance Painter has presets for UE4 so it’ll probably be the better option
For a house, you’ll want to create tiling textures and modular walls/ceiling/roof/windows/doors/etc. Once you got all the parts of a house, you can put them together to make a house, and those parts can be reused for multiple houses.
2 and 3. I’m sorry, I don’t have Modo Indie, but I do plan on purchasing it in the future.
If you want quick and easy lightmaps, just have UE4 auto generate them, it’ll use your texture UVs as a base, and pack them and pad them so it’ll work better for lightmaps.
I’d make most collision in UE4, there’s a lot of automated tools and it’s real easy and quick.
This is something that should have a lot of information on in the documentation. Make sure you bake using Mikk TSpace tangents.
I’d do tiling textures in Substance Designer and most of the other texturing in Painter.
It’s best not to get caught up with all the different tools available, for most people, you only really need a 3D program and an image editor. For example, I’m pretty sure that Modo has a feature where you can paint textures in the program which means you wouldn’t need Mari or Substance Painter. It’s probably not as good as those programs, but I know Mari is very expensive and it’s not a simple program to get into.
yeah I got the indie version of mari but its super tech…but like you said. modo has very deep texture tools in it…I honestly don’t see a difference. I just wish I could understand modo’s smoothing groups and lod making. theres no vids on that. and I cant find vids on how to set the pivot points on the meshes… I wish I didn’t learn max first knowing I couldn’t afford it lol…
Modo might not have smoothing groups–from messing with other programs it seems like smoothing groups is a term that applies to 3ds Max and other programs use different terminology. I wish I could help more, I have Modo 901 but I haven’t had the time to try and learn it.
Hey Sirhope!
Check out my old post about smoothing groups in MODO, it might help. Feel free to ask if you still have not understand how exactly it works - I’ll try to elaborate.
As for pivot point - you can move ELEMENTS(vertices, edges, polygons) of the object(Numeric 1,2,3 hotkeys) or the object itself(Press 5). Pivot point(For importing in UE4) is always in the center of the grid(0,0,0) so you have to move your object with 5 and then you’ll 100% sure how it will look in UE4.
Also I recommend to watch Peter Stammbach videos for Hardsurface modeling techniques and modeling workflow in general in Modo.
Don’t get fooled if you find something old, most of the old 701 and older tutorials around the internet are still valid as the core tools for mesh creation are the same. For example you can find almost every tool explained individually for Modo 601 here. Even old 501 default keyboard shortcut list may come in handy.
If you look at Modo tutorials, you may see that some people use scripting quite heavily, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t still use Modo Indie without them. For example Tor Frick uses a lot of Seneca’s boolean script and while you can’t use the script on Indie, you can use boolean substract macro, which should give similar results. 901 also includes some functionality that was previously provided by those scrips, like for example perfect circle. Scripts may make some tasks faster but they are hardly essential to have to be able to model in Modo Indie. There are also lots of macros for Modo around and they do work on Indie as well + you can make your own as well. You can find bunch of macros from this written tutorial (I can recommend you to read it as well, as it contains nicely put instructions how to deal with your own keyboard shortcuts and pie menus on Modo).
There’s also now a game webinar series going on, provided by The Foundry and streamed on Twitch. Past webinars should appear online soon as well.
Already linked Peter Stammbach channel is a good resource as well. Then there’s Pat Crandley’s tutorials if you want to get started from the very basics of Modo and 3D modeling.
For substance, I think the official Allegorithmic’s youtube channel is one of the best resources for video tutorials on Substance Painter and Substance Designer. Also don’t forget to check out Substance SHARE for hundreds of free substances which you can open in Substance Designer and learn from.
In case you need help on something specific issue, you can join #modo@freenode IRC or Modo + Mari Indie group’s chat on steam.
thank you guys so much for the info you all rock I’ll post here about my updates. I really want my story to come to life in a game…I know you’ll all love it. And I wanna show my family…
I’m so confused on it…
you all rock