A tutorial for preparing 3D models for texturing in Quixel Mixer. Please consider supporting the channel! Thanks for Watching! ko-fi.com/crom... paypal.me/kcrom...
@@Crompwell I'm immensely confused on this tut. I have a shotgun and I wanna only import them into quixel. Is it possible to clear up the process of vertex groups, materials, and baking?
@@blueminer3173 Vertex groups aren’t necessary. I just use them to store vertices for quick access/organization. You can simply apply the materials directly to the mesh component then bake or create the ID map. You can directly create the ID map with the low poly using texture paint mode.
I know this is such an odd compliment, but the music choice was really nice. I love the zen feel, it just makes me feel at peace, compared to being frustrated that something isn't working properly.
Thanks for this tutorial. It was really helpful for me. And i learned very much about: baking, exporting models to other programmes, texturing, etc. Thanks.
This is exactly what i've been looking for. I am still pretty new to all of this stuff, and I use blender for my modeling and been wondering how to do all this stuff for texturing my game assets for UE4 thank you so much for making this! You rock brother!
Awesome! Some tips: 1. Instead of using multiple models you can make a duplicate and join those. You then have one model to work on in Quixel. You do not need to have multiple objects in Mixer. You can then throw away the duplicate afterwards and use the materials that come out of Mixer on the original models. 2. Instead of Vertex Groups you can select/deselect by material in the material tab. 3. No need to have the duplicate scaled mesh. You can bake an objects model color with multiple materials by having a selected texture node in each material of that object. 4. Don't forget to play with your Birb 🐦
Actually best practice for texturing and overall game asset creation would be to use the .fbx file mesh that was used as lowpoly baking. This asset contains all of the correct normals and UVs. Modifying the original lowpoly model even slightly may change the triangulation, UVs, shading... etc. etc. May end up breaking your textures, smooth shading and so on. This ensures your model looks consistent across different applications. Another good practice would be to manually triangulate and apply transformation on your low and hipoly meshes to ensure your smoothing does not change between Blender and exported mesh file. You can avoid ton of different problems just by doing this.
Incredible tutorial man. Ive done tons of sculpting and retopo but UV/texturing always gets my brain tangled. So to no suprise when i wanted to work with mixer i nearly lost all the hair on my head haha. Expertly paced And brilliantly explained. Thanks! +1 Sub to you !
Previously, this was a pretty standard workflow for 3D texturing. The same principles have applied to other software, as well. Thankfully, the software and workflow have been updated.
If you want to select stuff in the outliner, I recommend using control clicking instead of shift clicking. I use the outliner since it's easier for me, but since control click and shift click reverse the order of selected objects, it makes following baking tutorials really difficult and confusing at times.
This was very helpful man thanks! looking for a substitute for substance painter. Been looking at this program for months but havent used it really. Going to start playing around with it for sure!!
Great tut ! Thank you so much ! Is it possible to blend the textures of the little rocks on their edges, between the little rock and the big base rock ? For that, I guess it needs to adjust the opacity of the mask of the little rocks on their edge, doesn't it ?
Yes, you could also apply a layer over the top of everything to help blend them together. You could also use a paint layer to mask them together. Lots of ways to do this.
Why do we need to bake image texture? I've tried to simply assign materials and export to mixer. Mixer automatically selects option to create texture sets by materials
Baking the image texture/color ID map is good for assigning different materials to parts of a single texture set, as opposed to using multiple texture sets. With the latest update to Mixer, we can now have multiple texture sets per object, which wasn’t possible before. So it’s not entirely necessary anymore, but could still be useful for managing complex detail and optimization per texture set.
Hello. I find your video very usefull and informative, but i have one question. What is this pie menu your are using at 22:36? Is it some custom quick favorites, or some plugin, or maybe native blender function? Thank you.
I’m always partial to quixel in so far that it does what you need because I am biased against Adobe. That said, substance IS industry standard and does more than Mixer currently. I use marmoset to make up for what I can’t do with mixer.
u can bake the color id direclt without duplicating the object by copy and posting the texture image 'color id " in each material shading node and u wont have any bleeding issues !!
@@Crompwell uhmm wierd for me works great i just assigne the materials to my model reset the transformand scale thing before unwarp i unwarp my model then set up color id node in shading mode for each and everysingle material that iv set for my model so it has the info where to bake for each material the ni bake it comes out great for me !!
Thanks, can you tell me how to see displacements in Mixer. I am exporting form Zbrush, I have UVs and I exported using Multimap exporter. I just cant get the displacements to show up. I also did turn on the displacement button. Gosh I cant find anything.
This might be due to the values of the displacement map itself, the displacement settings in Mixer, or something else. It’s really difficult for me to know for sure without being able to test it myself. I would recommend making sure your displacement map is grayscale and has a decent range of values, then tweak the values in Mixer to taste.
@@Crompwell Hi, thanks. I understand. Its gray, with a good range of values. I believe its 32 bit. and exported at .5 as the mid value. ..Hmmm. I really like Mixer. I just cant get this displacement right. and I cant find any documentation on it. All the presets in Mixer like other rock textures come in great. its just my custom ones is not.
Yes, it is possible to do this. It is also entirely possible to procedurally generate materials from scratch as well, it's just rather labor intensive. More so than if you use Substance since it has a node-based workflow with more generators for proc-gen materials.
@@daniellevasconcellos633 Yeah, substance designer is probably the most complete proc mat app at the moment. I’m not the biggest fan of Adobe, though. There are a few independently developed node based material apps on itch.io that are free but kind of “in-development.”
@@Crompwell I'm not either (in regards to Adobe). Im trying to find more economical substitutes. Using Serif Affinity and so on and so forth. Mixer is great... Just not much info out on it. I do appreciate your videos, though. Cant wait to see what else you do.
I’m trying to import a simple plane. Is 30 minutes of baking and all that other shit you’re doing necessary? Quixel is giving me a prompt saying “seems to have missing uv coordinates”…. How do we fix that?
No, Quixel should have a plane primitive. Just choose that instead of doing a custom mesh import. In the setup tab, go to Type and select "plane" instead of 3D asset or custom model. Any new mix should open with this as the default model.
So maybe this is a dumb question, however when doing this with a solid object (I am using a table model I made) I cannot shrink it down to be "inside" the other object to bake, how do I do this? when I leave them both the same scale and bake, I get a lot of mixed grainy colors bleeding over. I hope this makes sense, and if someone knows the fix please let me know. but overall great video!
Yeah, go into edit mode and use ALT+S to very slightly offset the geometry of the mesh. so you don’t get baking errors. In my newer video I show how to make an ID map without baking.
This happens in a lot of applications that use displacement. I believe it has something to do with the way the UV's are set up. I've had problems with this in other applications. I'll take a look and let you know if I find anything worth mentioning. For now, check out how your UV's are laid out and play with the displacement settings.
To detail the baking process. Normally, what I do is create a new texture, select the desired faces and fill with a single color. I'll show this in a future tutorial.
@@nugger The reason we bake things is to transfer details from one mesh to another. So, no it's not that there is less quality, it's that we do it for different reasons and circumstances. Just keep an eye out for the next video and hopefully it'll make more sense.
@@Crompwell I didn't know that was the idea, I thought that baking was used to bake AO, lighting, roughness, specular, etc...into the texture, and normals had a special case of baking hi poly into low poly, therefore it obviously needed to have two meshes, I never realized that baking Id color maps was just like baking normals, it's just strange to me I guess lol
You could bring those other maps into Mixer, if you need them. A lot of the content within Mixer already has that data. It really depends on what you're doing. You can also procedurally create some of those maps in Mixer, as well.
Thanks for this, Can this process be used to do say a Daz 3D character skin texture by making a ColourID from the UV sets? I been trying but having issues loading the base Albedo's so I can add details and normals if they have them to blend into the new created normals. sadly there's no humans on this planet, well can't be, I see no tutorials about making character skins
Kiwi Hawk you’re going to run into issues with DAZ models using Mixer, at least until the next update, because DAZ models have multiple materials assigned per model and Mixer only currently supports one material per object. They have shown that the next major update will include multi-material assignments per object, so keep an eye out for that update.
athan336 No, you don’t need to bake a color ID map, but it can be useful. I believe there is triplanar mapping, but having a good UV layout will help you. Any UV islands that fall out of the 0-1 space will end up stretched.
I'm no expert in this particular area but those bakes took way too long. (Unless your machine is a dinosaur). You have render samples at 128? Try 1. Without any lighting/shading you shouldn't need more than one sample.
Great video! :D
Quixel you need to put on more tutorials come on the world is waiting @home
Great software! :D
@@Crompwell I'm immensely confused on this tut. I have a shotgun and I wanna only import them into quixel. Is it possible to clear up the process of vertex groups, materials, and baking?
@@blueminer3173 What are you confused about?
@@blueminer3173 Vertex groups aren’t necessary. I just use them to store vertices for quick access/organization. You can simply apply the materials directly to the mesh component then bake or create the ID map. You can directly create the ID map with the low poly using texture paint mode.
Man this is such a good time to be a 3d Artist. So much power completely for free!
This is a truly fantastic tutorial! And I greatly appreciate how active you are in answering peoples questions, it makes me happy to see.
I appreciate the kind words and am glad to help :)
One of the few tutorials on UA-cam that i can fully understand, thanks!
Thanks for the video and thanks UA-cam algorithm for suggesting this video to me!
I know this is such an odd compliment, but the music choice was really nice. I love the zen feel, it just makes me feel at peace, compared to being frustrated that something isn't working properly.
:) Thanks! Glad you enjoy it.
Thanks for the help!
Control Click to select in the outline
Thanks for this tutorial. It was really helpful for me. And i learned very much about: baking, exporting models to other programmes, texturing, etc. Thanks.
You’re welcome! Thanks for watching :)
This is exactly what i've been looking for. I am still pretty new to all of this stuff, and I use blender for my modeling and been wondering how to do all this stuff for texturing my game assets for UE4 thank you so much for making this! You rock brother!
Dude you R Gold ! Subbed and liked! Great video :)
Awesome! Some tips:
1. Instead of using multiple models you can make a duplicate and join those. You then have one model to work on in Quixel. You do not need to have multiple objects in Mixer. You can then throw away the duplicate afterwards and use the materials that come out of Mixer on the original models.
2. Instead of Vertex Groups you can select/deselect by material in the material tab.
3. No need to have the duplicate scaled mesh. You can bake an objects model color with multiple materials by having a selected texture node in each material of that object.
4. Don't forget to play with your Birb 🐦
Yes, I cover a lot of this in newer videos. Thanks!
Actually best practice for texturing and overall game asset creation would be to use the .fbx file mesh that was used as lowpoly baking. This asset contains all of the correct normals and UVs. Modifying the original lowpoly model even slightly may change the triangulation, UVs, shading... etc. etc. May end up breaking your textures, smooth shading and so on. This ensures your model looks consistent across different applications. Another good practice would be to manually triangulate and apply transformation on your low and hipoly meshes to ensure your smoothing does not change between Blender and exported mesh file. You can avoid ton of different problems just by doing this.
Incredible tutorial man. Ive done tons of sculpting and retopo but UV/texturing always gets my brain tangled. So to no suprise when i wanted to work with mixer i nearly lost all the hair on my head haha. Expertly paced And brilliantly explained. Thanks! +1 Sub to you !
Skyflairl2p Thanks for the kind words. I can sympathize with Mixer’s limited handling of UVs, being locked to 0-1 and no tiling.
Holy crap…this is an extraordinary amount of work just to get it ready for mixer…this better come out to something really amazing in the end 🤪🤪🤪🤪
Previously, this was a pretty standard workflow for 3D texturing. The same principles have applied to other software, as well. Thankfully, the software and workflow have been updated.
Awesome video, really needed this kind of follow through the process. Thank you! Keep it up!
Glad it helped!
Thank you so much for this! It explained it really well.
Awesome tutorial, appreciate it! :)
Thank you
Brilliant tutorial!
If you want to select stuff in the outliner, I recommend using control clicking instead of shift clicking. I use the outliner since it's easier for me, but since control click and shift click reverse the order of selected objects, it makes following baking tutorials really difficult and confusing at times.
Yes, very useful. Although it is kind of backwards compared to how selecting works in the viewport.
Freakin' legend man, keep it up.
That was extremely helpful! Thanks a lot!!
Glad it helped!
Great tutorial
Thank you!
You got my sub! Looking forward to see more
Thanks!
:)
Thank you sir! Helps a lot.
Glad to help :)
Thanks dude.
really great!
I loved this video! Thanks man you got a new sub :)
Butthe4d Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it :)
This was very helpful man thanks! looking for a substitute for substance painter. Been looking at this program for months but havent used it really. Going to start playing around with it for sure!!
Glad you found it helpful!
VEry helpfull! Thank you so much! :)
Thank you!
Tnks!
No problem!
how do I fix my color ID?
it has glitch effects on some arts of it
In every other tutorial it is not clear that you can’t export a model with more than one material slot. Thanks for clarifying
Exactly what I needed! Thank you! PS What is the name of the music in the background? It was so soothing and fitted in perfectly.
HerbalWhite120 To be honest, I don’t remember what the song is, but I believe it is from the UA-cam music library.
Thanks! too clear, I just wondering, how can I get the blender tool for save like yours, it's like a pie tool, but looks different.
I use Machin3 Tools for this, it's a free addon. I highly recommend it. gum.co/MACHIN3tools
@@Crompwell Thanks a lot!
Great tut ! Thank you so much ! Is it possible to blend the textures of the little rocks on their edges, between the little rock and the big base rock ? For that, I guess it needs to adjust the opacity of the mask of the little rocks on their edge, doesn't it ?
Yes, you could also apply a layer over the top of everything to help blend them together. You could also use a paint layer to mask them together. Lots of ways to do this.
Why do we need to bake image texture? I've tried to simply assign materials and export to mixer. Mixer automatically selects option to create texture sets by materials
Baking the image texture/color ID map is good for assigning different materials to parts of a single texture set, as opposed to using multiple texture sets. With the latest update to Mixer, we can now have multiple texture sets per object, which wasn’t possible before. So it’s not entirely necessary anymore, but could still be useful for managing complex detail and optimization per texture set.
Hello. I find your video very usefull and informative, but i have one question. What is this pie menu your are using at 22:36? Is it some custom quick favorites, or some plugin, or maybe native blender function? Thank you.
Machin3 Tools addon. I highly recommend.
10/10
thanks!
No problem!
WOW, what shortcut you used to export the object? it was so cool hahahah
It's a free addon called Machin3 tools. I highly recommend it. Once installed, the shortcut is CTRL + S.
Still making my mind up Quixel or Substance painter
I’m always partial to quixel in so far that it does what you need because I am biased against Adobe. That said, substance IS industry standard and does more than Mixer currently. I use marmoset to make up for what I can’t do with mixer.
when I bake image all the colors are grainy and mix with each other...what am I doing wrong?
You may need to bake with a cage or offset your baking geo more. It's hard for me to troubleshoot without seeing or having access to the project.
my quixle mixer doesn't have a custom mesh option. only a custom model option.
I might have misspoke, but that's the option you want.
u can bake the color id direclt without duplicating the object by copy and posting the texture image 'color id " in each material shading node and u wont have any bleeding issues !!
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try!
So I tried it, but I can't seem to get it to bake properly. It bakes, but the image texture ends up looking distorted.
@@Crompwell uhmm wierd for me works great i just assigne the materials to my model reset the transformand scale thing before unwarp i unwarp my model then set up color id node in shading mode for each and everysingle material that iv set for my model so it has the info where to bake for each material the ni bake it comes out great for me !!
is there a way to have 2d and 3d view opened at the same time like in Substance painter?
I wish
Thanks, can you tell me how to see displacements in Mixer. I am exporting form Zbrush, I have UVs and I exported using Multimap exporter. I just cant get the displacements to show up. I also did turn on the displacement button. Gosh I cant find anything.
This might be due to the values of the displacement map itself, the displacement settings in Mixer, or something else. It’s really difficult for me to know for sure without being able to test it myself. I would recommend making sure your displacement map is grayscale and has a decent range of values, then tweak the values in Mixer to taste.
@@Crompwell Hi, thanks. I understand. Its gray, with a good range of values. I believe its 32 bit. and exported at .5 as the mid value. ..Hmmm. I really like Mixer. I just cant get this displacement right. and I cant find any documentation on it. All the presets in Mixer like other rock textures come in great. its just my custom ones is not.
Good video. Your voice is fighting the music though, I suggest turning it down a bit!
Thanks for the feedback. My newer videos don't have music in them.
i didn't understand why you need to bake, why not just load the default cliff in mixer ?
Default cliff doesn’t have IDs in the case that you want to target parts of the mesh.
THANK YOUU
Is it possible to use mixer to create your own custom textures? Example, downloading a wood texture from the web and making your own smart layer?
Perhaps something for a future video?
Yes, it is possible to do this. It is also entirely possible to procedurally generate materials from scratch as well, it's just rather labor intensive. More so than if you use Substance since it has a node-based workflow with more generators for proc-gen materials.
@@Crompwell I don't have substance painter... I can only afford free lol. But I understand what you mean.
@@daniellevasconcellos633 Yeah, substance designer is probably the most complete proc mat app at the moment. I’m not the biggest fan of Adobe, though. There are a few independently developed node based material apps on itch.io that are free but kind of “in-development.”
@@Crompwell I'm not either (in regards to Adobe). Im trying to find more economical substitutes. Using Serif Affinity and so on and so forth. Mixer is great... Just not much info out on it. I do appreciate your videos, though. Cant wait to see what else you do.
is it possible to import garment from clo3d to mixer?
As long as you export it as an acceptable 3D model file extension, I don’t see why not.
Instead of cleaning up the mesh manually, you could just use the merge by distance option
6:07
@@Crompwell ohhh, sorry bout that my bad
I’m trying to import a simple plane. Is 30 minutes of baking and all that other shit you’re doing necessary? Quixel is giving me a prompt saying “seems to have missing uv coordinates”…. How do we fix that?
No, Quixel should have a plane primitive. Just choose that instead of doing a custom mesh import.
In the setup tab, go to Type and select "plane" instead of 3D asset or custom model. Any new mix should open with this as the default model.
what's the music in background?
If memory serves, something from the UA-cam music library.
Great video. I don’t think you needed 128 render passes. Also, why do we have to bake from one mesh to another? Why can’t we just bake using one mesh?
You are correct, I didn’t need that many passes. In the newer video I show how to create the texture using one mesh.
So maybe this is a dumb question, however when doing this with a solid object (I am using a table model I made) I cannot shrink it down to be "inside" the other object to bake, how do I do this? when I leave them both the same scale and bake, I get a lot of mixed grainy colors bleeding over. I hope this makes sense, and if someone knows the fix please let me know. but overall great video!
Yeah, go into edit mode and use ALT+S to very slightly offset the geometry of the mesh. so you don’t get baking errors. In my newer video I show how to make an ID map without baking.
When I import my model into mixer and try to apply materials the displacement causes the edges of each poly to separate for some reason. Any ideas?
This happens in a lot of applications that use displacement. I believe it has something to do with the way the UV's are set up. I've had problems with this in other applications. I'll take a look and let you know if I find anything worth mentioning. For now, check out how your UV's are laid out and play with the displacement settings.
Thank you, but I don't really get why create copy of the mesh to bake the colors in?
To detail the baking process. Normally, what I do is create a new texture, select the desired faces and fill with a single color. I'll show this in a future tutorial.
@@Crompwell so baking with only one model is going to have less quality?
@@nugger The reason we bake things is to transfer details from one mesh to another. So, no it's not that there is less quality, it's that we do it for different reasons and circumstances. Just keep an eye out for the next video and hopefully it'll make more sense.
@@Crompwell I didn't know that was the idea, I thought that baking was used to bake AO, lighting, roughness, specular, etc...into the texture, and normals had a special case of baking hi poly into low poly, therefore it obviously needed to have two meshes, I never realized that baking Id color maps was just like baking normals, it's just strange to me I guess lol
And thank you for your replies!
what is th music!?
subbed :)
What other maps should we export bring into Mixer as well? Normals, Curvature, AO?
You could bring those other maps into Mixer, if you need them. A lot of the content within Mixer already has that data. It really depends on what you're doing. You can also procedurally create some of those maps in Mixer, as well.
@@Crompwell Awesome thank you!
Thanks for this, Can this process be used to do say a Daz 3D character skin texture by making a ColourID from the UV sets? I been trying but having issues loading the base Albedo's so I can add details and normals if they have them to blend into the new created normals. sadly there's no humans on this planet, well can't be, I see no tutorials about making character skins
Kiwi Hawk you’re going to run into issues with DAZ models using Mixer, at least until the next update, because DAZ models have multiple materials assigned per model and Mixer only currently supports one material per object. They have shown that the next major update will include multi-material assignments per object, so keep an eye out for that update.
@@Crompwell Thank you
dislikes are from adobe substance users
Thanks, very helpful video!!! the music is a bit distracting thou
Noted!
do u need to bake to use quixel
athan336 No, you don’t need to bake a color ID map, but it can be useful. I believe there is triplanar mapping, but having a good UV layout will help you. Any UV islands that fall out of the 0-1 space will end up stretched.
blender user heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey
My setup section cant be found I dont know why haha
22:38 how do you get that export menu?
Machin3 Tools addon: gumroad.com/l/machin3tools
Crompwell cheers mate, keep up the great content
7 77 Thanks! Will do.
I'm no expert in this particular area but those bakes took way too long. (Unless your machine is a dinosaur). You have render samples at 128? Try 1. Without any lighting/shading you shouldn't need more than one sample.
Background music isn't necessary :)
Moral of the story dont buy 3d models off random artist 9 times out of 10 they're so fucked
According to the person who sent me this model, it’s from a very well known game made by a large famous studio, lol.
oh no not Blender again. Alt S Ctrl right click.