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+  "text": " Okay, so now we have our beetle high res mesh sort of figured out here. The next step is to basically turn this into a more finalized Nanite game ready mesh. So that's going to be our next steps as far as the tutorial are concerned. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show some techniques of how I actually optimize down the geometry because The moment you can see this is really, really dense. There's a lot of smoothing happening with turbo smoothing things like that. And although we want this to look really nice and detailed, we definitely don't need it to be as high poly as what we have here. We can cut down on some of the geometry. So the way I'm gonna generally work with this is we're going to come back into our working files that we have. So using the leg again as the sort of main example, because there's a lot of the challenges that we have in the legs are also gonna be present in all the other parts. So once we learn how to do it with the legs, we can easily do the body in the other parts. It's exactly the same workflow and technique. So one thing to note before we jump in is that I have actually separated out the feet a little bit. So you can see that these guys here, if we sort of come through, so we've got our different like foot pieces and everything here. So this is where we left the high poly before we have our feet with kind of more detail and everything here, the different pieces. So what I've done is I've made a foot which is created from collection instances. So each one of these is a separate section. So if we then jump back over into these pieces, these are the individual feet section. So if we kind of come through here, you can see we've got the first part of the foot, we've got the second part of the foot, the third part. And then we've got, This section is actually part of the toe and then we have this other claw section. So when you bring all of that together, you've essentially got each one of these pieces. These sections here, the intention with this was to have this kind of working in the sense that we could rotate it and everything. Let me just bring up the gizmo one second. All right, the gizmo wasn't showing because I had, I have transforms locked. So if I jump over to rotate, you can see this here. So this is kind of set up so that I can actually test the animation and that's something that is definitely helpful is sort of coming in here we showed before is locking the rotations and locations and things. So you can actually test the movement and see how this is going to interact and work. So you can see here that we can rotate these individual pieces and actually test our animation or how these are actually gonna move and articulate. So these sections here, this is the toe, so we can just rotate our toes this way, and then we can also rotate the claw as well. So it gives us a lot of movement and everything. So that's how this is now set up. I just wanted to recap that because I slightly changed how these guys are working, but it's using the same process as before where we use the instances, the collection instances, to sort of bring that in. And then I've just parented everything together so that you can move each one of these kind of individually. Everything nothing moves except this one. These guys are all just rotating, right? So that's kind of how the foot piece is working So then we will now want to jump into how do we actually optimize down some of this geometry and some of it's going to be easier than other parts especially if we've not Done any kind of quad remesh like in these cases a lot of this is quad remesh for preview So we're going to have to rework some of these but we'll we'll sort of go through that process The other thing I would like to do as well is set up a little bit of a Folder structure again as we did before in the other part so we can actually work on our Low poly pieces and start to see them together So to do that I would you can create new folders it wherever you want in terms of the structure and everything I'm probably just gonna create a new one Which is basically just gonna be our low poly or nanite mesh whatever you want to call it We'll call it low poly that's probably gonna be fine And then what I want to do here is I want to create one for the legs and I'm going to basically put all of my pieces from these collection instances Into here, so we'll just add those in so we'll start with the FEMA I like to basically in this case what I'm trying to achieve is I just want to add in a bunch of these Individual leg pieces and then we're going to effectively move them and kind of offset them from each other so that when we actually bake These later in substance that they're not going to interact with each other So we can just visually see them all but we're not going to have any issues So next we'll choose I want to go through and actually add the individual pieces of the feet So we'll come through here and just do that So this just means we can visually see each one of these and it might be easier to duplicate them and just add each foot in this way So as we optimize these will actually start to see How these are looking so Grab the claw and then we'll just add the toe in as well. Whoops duplicate that Okay, so that is all this is now basically all the pieces that we have of the leg Right, those are all the sections that we need and then as we work on this these collections We are actually going to Have have this this stuff Update right so that's the kind of aim there the other thing I would also say is that When I worked on this I duplicated the high poly So that I had a backup the other alternative you can also do is just save a slightly another version like an iterative version of Of the blender file. That's something that I would definitely suggest So that you have a backup as you work here, but I want to edit this geometry We have here is the geometry I want for the final mesh So I want it to update here and then I also want it to update on the final model of the beetle as well So it's easier for me to just do that directly in these particular Models here. So if you are going to do that, just remember that it's going to be Destructive so sometimes it's good to just have a backup for that stuff So using the FEMA as an example here I'm going to show some of the ways that I would actually Optimize this geometry and then get it ready for unwrapping. So We're focusing we'll cover unwrapping as the second part of this But I just want to show how I'm going to optimize this geometry So at the moment you can see that this is something like 300,000 triangles Which is a lot for just one section of the model So we don't need it to be anywhere near as dense as that and you can see that this is kind of broken down Into different pieces a lot of the ones that say re topo here are when we've run the quadri mesh So if we were to remove those we're left with these pieces, which are where they've actually been modeled a little bit more by hand So if you're approaching one that's been modeled by hand, this is usually pretty straightforward You would usually come in and see what the modifiers are doing as far as what we've got in here So you can see that I do Add bevels and boolean so we'll kind of go through each one of these and how we could optimize this So usually if I've got a bevel and it's not if it had lots and lots of sides like it was say 20 sided We probably wouldn't need it to be as dense as that so usually I'll pick something that you don't want it to look Too polygonal you want it to be pretty smooth in general So kind of check the silhouette and things like that and use reasonable amounts because we need to unwrap this So we don't want it to be super dense and hard to work with so it's kind of what we're doing here and Then as you can see we go through this process. We've got these different Booleans So usually the stuff that is The the booleans and things like that I would usually try and collapse down a lot of this stuff So we can go through that in a second and I'll I'll usually find a place where I want to collapse down So generally what I tend to do with stuff like this is I'll collapse down where the geometry is easily Workable and then if we've got something like a bevel that's beveling all the edges like this that becomes a lot harder to work with. So I leave that as a non-destructive. I don't collapse that down basically. So in this case, we would just come through and collapse all the elements, which now leaves us with this kind of base geometry for the object, right? And from this, we can now just clear all the edges. So I have a shortcut in hard ops for that, which we can just do here. So if we just do clear sharps, that's going to remove. Let's do that again. So, just undo this. So if you do clear sharps, it defaults to remove the modifier. So we'll just turn that off. And then we can just do a shade smooth. So now we have no hard edges or anything in the model. And then usually what I'll do is I'll just come through and if there's any sort of geometry that needs cleaning up, I'll just come through and remove that. So there's a couple of edges here. At the moment for something like this as well, I'm not worried about there being lots of endgones. N guns you can see that these are like crazy n guns and things like that. I'm not worried about that right this moment I just want to get everything as clean as possible And then usually I'll just go for and see if I can tidy up any verts or edges that aren't really looking that great So in here, we're just kind of connecting these up And then we can just yeah add in some extra edges to just tidy up what we can see here And then usually for something like this you can also add a triangulate modifier So if we do that you'll see this is what the the actual object is looking like when you add the triangulate on And you can sort of look at the different the details here and how this is coming together So some of this you can actually kind of clean up yourself So you can see here we could just kind of connect these up and where it makes sense I would just add in edges To kind of connect stuff up As I've been the line along the lines of this kind of stuff and we can just sort of come through and do a pass on that Try and add geometry that sort of makes sense to close up some of those endgones And then as you're working if try not to sort of repeat the same process over and over again You can see that this model is symmetryed so we can just mirror that and you can see that we can Update a lot of those edges and then I'll collapse down the mirror so you can see that that's already looking a lot better Generally when you're working with stuff you want to avoid really long thin triangles like you can see in these scenarios here like most of this stuff is pretty good. A lot of this is fine, but here we have these really long thin triangles which are not ideal. So we could then add like a couple of edges in there just to help that so that there's not as many long thin edges. So we could just put a couple of edges in here to do that. And then as we add the triangulate now you can see that that's definitely just a little bit cleaner. So that's going to look a bit better I think in terms of our topology. So this is already looking much nicer if we turn back on the other Parts of this model what you'll notice is that we've got a big kind of hole in the model And we have this big section in here And we don't need some of the faces that we can see on the back of this model So one things we can do here is we could delete these back faces and then we could take This stuff kind of forward a little bit more. So just sliding the edges until we get to a reasonable place there you can kind of see how that's working so you're not never going to see in there so as long as this is looking decent from from sort of most angles that's what you want to check you want to make sure that there's no you can't see any back faces and things like that but that's generally the process there so as far as kind of cleaning that mesh up you can sort of see that there we do have a couple of issues with the way that the bevel modifier is working at the moment so you can see that it's doing this weird kind of thing there. So what I would do in the bevel modifier is come down to where it says geometry and just turn off loop slide that's going to keep that really nice and clean. And then for a small bevel like this, you probably don't need to have six divisions. So I would maybe go for between something like four to two bevel depending on the size of it. If you need this to smooth a bit nicer, then you can obviously add a weighted normals to that or Alternatively you can turn on the harder normals in the bevel which will give you pretty nice smoothing So you can see sort of how that looks and it's all going to depend on the scale of this Actually in the model right so we're not going to see super close up to this. So maybe we don't need For on our bevel we could probably get away with three or two And that's probably going to look just fine for our model And it's going to be nice and easy to work with because the topology of this isn't too crazy So we're only looking at 4,000 triangles for this particular object at the moment, right? So this is definitely a lot easier to work with than what we had before And then we have our weighted normals if we wanted to add that and our triangulate Just collapse the mirror down and the triangulate will kind of keep all of the geometry nice and clean So if we export that into a game measure for baking we can add the triangulate to this so that's going to look pretty good and then Let's now kind of cover another example here. So that covers like how we would optimize and try and sort this out. If you've got these guys, it would probably be a good idea to maybe snap these. Let's just try and move that there. So that should be good. So yeah, you can just kind of straighten out the edges and things here. So that's a way that you might optimize something like that. For these pieces, these are even easier because the topology of this is already pretty good. So in this case, you could maybe remove a couple of the edge loops out of this if you wanted to. It's not like a huge issue, but yeah, maybe just remove a couple of edge loops out of that. You can see sort of the detail that we have. And then for this one, again, we've got the bevel modifier. So we can come in and choose like how many bevels we're gonna use on this, maybe four is fine. And then this has weighted normals as well. And then we can always add triangulate to this one. This one isn't gonna need triangulate apart from on the capped edges there. So if you wanted to add that in there, you can definitely do that. You can see how that's gonna fix up our center circle there. And then on this one, same kind of story, you can just go through. So that process is really straightforward for stuff where you've modeled the topology really nicely. Like if you've modeled something yourself, it's gonna be pretty easy to come through the modifiers and just enable and disable stuff. So here if I've got this object, you can see it has a Boolean applied. So usually what I'd be looking for here is collapsing everything apart from the last bevel. So if we're looking at this, you can see that we have our Boolean, we have our bevel applied. This actually does have subdivision, so we can choose if we want to add subdivision or not, which we can go over in a second, but I would collapse down the Boolean. So when I do that, I get this message saying, do you wanna make this a single object? It's basically because it's an instance. So the reason for that is because in some of my other pieces, I reuse that same section, right? I use it again in some of the feet and things like that. You can see this sort of sphere is on the end of this object. So it's the same object, right? So in this case, I wanted to basically unwrap this object once and then just reuse it. So what I would do in this case is basically make a folder under here and just call it instance, and then I can just move anything that I want to be an instance into that folder. So I know that it's an instance and not to include it when I do my baking and unwrapping, right? So that's just a bit of advice there, but we could collapse down this Boolean here And then, yeah, for optimizing this particular one, you can see that we have the subdivision as well. So I would probably just select everything and remove the mirrored part of this. And then this bevel is fine. For subdivision, you can definitely add subdivision in there, but you're gonna see that it's gonna add a huge amount of topology to this, which in this case, isn't going to make the object really that much smoother in a lot of cases. It's not the most optimal way to basically make things nice and smooth in this case. So what you could do is either use a lower subdivision amount, which is going to bring the topology down a lot. Or in the case of this, what I did, because it made it a lot easier to work with, was basically add extra divisions into parts where I want it to be smoother and then use my flow, set flow to basically smooth this out. Sometimes the set flow will do weird things like this, so you have to kind of scale them a bit manually. But you can see here that that can be a much better way to smooth out that silhouette and shape. In some cases, you just don't need that subdivision, right? So as we add the subdivision, it's going to smooth things, but in this case, you can't really tell much of a difference, and it's a lot higher topology for not a lot of gain. So in a lot of cases, I would just add in that subdivision myself manually and try to to clean up the topology, because I'm mostly focusing on how easy this is to work with when it comes to unwrapping and that kind of stuff. So we just don't need all of these edges sometimes when you're working with this mesh. You can still have it feel very smooth and interesting without having loads of topology being added. So you can sort of see that this is still looking very nice, even though it's not that much different when we add this subdivision. And again, it's all about scale and context, right? So when you sort of see this on the size you're gonna see it, it's not gonna be super detailed. So yeah, that covers like the basic process for things that are already modeled, like when you've got something that's in a pretty good spot like this, and it's just a case of removing a couple of modifiers and cleaning up the geometry and everything. One thing I do wanna cover though, is a scenario like this, where we have an edge on the inside, but some of it is kind of covered. So my tip for that is basically just applying a bit of an inset in here so that you get to a stage where you basically have a piece of the geometry that you're not gonna see you can remove because you don't want to UV that and waste UV space in there, but you still want a nice kind of rounded edge on this particular area. So that's an advice I'd give for things like that when you have a central piece kind of in there that you can't see is basically try to remove any geometry that isn't going to be seen. And you can do that by just in setting there. Okay, so now we've shown how to optimize some of the geometry where we've worked just with mostly modeling techniques such as Booleans and things like that. I wanna show where we've actually used something like the quadrime-measure to get more remesed topology and how we're actually gonna work with this type of information, right? So sometimes this can be pretty good its own topology you can see that if we look at this though the quadrature does have errors in some places so if you wanted to get clean topology you'd need to kind of come in and clean up some of these issues or go back to the original mesh that used to generate this and try and regenerate it so there's kind of two ways to approach this so let's turn these guys off and we'll just have a look at one of the examples so that's why I kept all of this stuff as as reference and as backups so that we can actually work with this stuff here. So we'll just turn on some of these modifiers here. You can see that we have this piece. So I'm gonna take this section here and you can see how this is actually looking, right? So for something like this, you can see the topology of this is around 5000 triangles. One approach is that we could collapse this down and then come in and manually clean up our topology, right? That's definitely a good could be a good approach depending on what it is. In this case, this is very organic. So we're probably not gonna save a huge amount of topology by doing that. So in this case, we could actually come in with the quadrille measure and try and use that topology as our final topology for the model. So let's kind of get back to where that is. And so with that, you just basically wanna come in here and turn on these different options and experiment with the topology you're gonna get from remeshing this. So if we remesh this now, we need to make sure that we don't have our symmetry enabled and we run our remesh. And so you can see that that does create some pretty clean topology. And in the case of this as well, we're not gonna need a lot of this underside geometry as well. So this could actually be a pretty good mesh. You can see that it's around 9,000. We could experiment with lower as well if we wanted to try to get to closer to our topology from before. So let's kind of go from, to say 3000. And you can see this is what we get. And then sometimes you can notice like you have errors. So in this case, this one wouldn't be too difficult to kind of manually clean up there. So yeah, and again, sort of here as well, you can see there's a little error on the edges there. So as you get lower, you start to run into some slight errors on the edges. There are also things you can kind of clean up in here as well. So if we were to work with this particular mesh, we've got say edges in here that we definitely don't need. So we can remove that. Same for this, like we're not gonna ever see into here. So we can just basically clean up a lot of this, just selecting all of these particular sections here, and just basically removing that. So I'm just gonna select all of that. And you can just remove these parts. And then it would be the same here. So I found it pretty helpful when I was doing stuff like this to basically just come in here and select with Seam so if I go into here, and then I can just basically draw around The edges here and the reason I'm keeping like a buffer I'll show you that in a second if I come through here So you can just select all of this and then just mark that and then do a selection and select by Seam so we just missed one there. Let's do that If we select by scene, this is going to select this island. We can remove it And so now you can see that this is pretty low topology There's a couple of bits like that we would potentially want to kind of clean up in here But you can sort of see that we've got something that would be Usable as like a final geometry there the reason we keep that that buffer is because if we wanted to apply Say a bevel modifier to this then we can keep this nice edge. So if we were to increase the bevel size of this a little bit, let's kind of punch that in. Whoops, I meant to do it on this one. Okay, so yeah, so now you can see that this keeps that nice seam that we have in there, like the panel line seam by adding that bevel in there. So that's why we keep the geometry kind of underneath. If we didn't have this, so if we select like a bunch of this stuff and just remove it, you'll see that we don't get that nice bevel on there anymore. So you don't get a nice transitional seam there. So that's one of the reasons why we're keeping that geometry in the inside there. And it just allows us to have a nice seam there. So this is one way to work with the quad-remesh topology. Another way, and we'll go for this particular example, because this is an example where I didn't rely on the quad-remesh topology there. So if we hide this guy and turn on some of our retopode areas, you can see that I have done a quad-remeshed version of this. So that's what that kind of looks like, right? So if we just were to actually work with the original topology, what you'll see here is that these are a lot more hard-edge shapes. So we don't need to worry so much about, we've got flatter sections of the model. So we can definitely do this cheaper in its original topology. So for this, I would basically just come in and clean this up. So it's the same process as before. We choose like the different details. And you can see here that as we kind of smooth out a lot of these areas, we have modifiers that we're using where there's a lot of topology, like the bevel for example has seven sides. We could say optimize that down. This cutter that's in here has a bevel with a lot of sides on it. So again, we can just come in and reduce the amount of sides, which is gonna save us time when it comes to optimizing, right? So we can come through here and just check all of these. And then we've got this other one. So we would come into this guy and basically reduce the amount of bevels here. And then that would be starting to look pretty good. It's not looking too bad. And then we have this cut in here. So that's now maybe some topology that we could actually work with. So we can remove this subdivision and just apply all the modifiers and in this case you could you can actually keep the backup Right, so if you wanted to just duplicate this and pull this in here as our final topology Then we can turn off our references and collapse this down and keep that geometry So in this case what I would probably do here is where we have got our quadrime meshed version of this We can just delete that and the same for this guy as well where we've got our Quadrimeshed version we can just remove that and this is now going to be The final topology we actually have for our model right and the same for this guy This is going to require a lot of cleanup. So what you can see here is There's just like a lot of issues in general with Lots of kind of vertices and things like that where it's not super clean So there's a few ways to kind of tackle that Firstly what I would do is just run Remove all of the sharp angles and edges so you can sort of see that that just keeps everything nice and smooth And then what I would do in places like this is usually there's a couple of tools you can use like the mesh machines boolean cleanup can be really great for this so if you You run this you can basically use it to kind of weld up all the verts that you have from a Boolean So that can definitely be a good way to optimize geometry that you can see there So that's like a really quick way To get rid of things like this. You basically just run the Boolean cleanup. Sometimes this will fail But it is a really nice tool that can basically save you you a lot of time So especially when you've got stuff like this going on where it's just just a mess of vertices where the Booleans have kind of Interacted and you just want to really quickly Clean that up and you can see at the moment It's kind of welding these guys to this geometry if you want it to be the other way around you just do a mouse wheel And it will basically do it the opposite way which can keep I want to keep the silhouette of the rounding of this So that's what I'm doing there You can see that we Optimize that geometry really quickly and then you can always just go with the manual approach as well Right just kind of manually coming in here and welding up vets or connecting them and remember the tip I showed before is don't do this work twice. You can see that this is mirrored So we just add a mirror modifier to that and then for something like this as well We'd want to add a bevel so if we add the bevel you'll start to see where the bevel is working pretty well And then in places where it's not that usually means that we're looking at an area where there's some vertices that we need to kind of come in and clean up so you can see here that this is a section where we'd want to come in and weld those and then we've got a much more bevel that's actually working so and turn our loop slide back off and you can start to see here so in this one this is mostly to do with some of the edges plus also it's to do with the angle as well so another thing you can also do if you've got that are very close to each other is just do a merge by distance which will sometimes fix up any really small verts and you can see this is definitely getting into a much nicer kind of look here and yeah we can see here that we just want to sort of shift some of our verts to get some smoothing so if you see the bevel kind of overshoot like this you can just move your edges and things a little bit and that's going to clean that up so yeah so you can start to see kind of how that's working you probably wouldn't even want a bevel that's as large as this so if you're going for say point three you can see that we're getting pretty clean topology now on this particular object and this has obviously been worked up From a boolean mesh here, so you can sort of see how that's looking It's definitely getting into a much better place So that is my workflow if I'm working with something where I've quadrimeshed it Usually I have the backup of the topology some things are going to be harder to clean up than others So like as an example This particular section is going to be really easy to clean up right because it's not complicated We can come back into our references here Find that piece and you can see that that's not going to be a hard thing to tidy up a tool So it'd be pretty easy so it depends on the piece and and the complexity of what you've got going on in there But yeah, definitely having those reference assets that you worked with before before you run a quick quadrature Is really good because we can always come back to those and we can work them back up again So that's kind of the aim and we we just want everything to feel like it has a relatively even quad flow and we're probably aiming for things to not be super dense and generally We want to try to make sure that things smooth nicely at this stage because this is going to be our final mesh And we're also not going to be using a High to low poly bake we're not going to be using normal maps To bake in the geometry. We're mostly just going to be relying on the geometry itself So that's definitely something that you want to consider And then the other thing as well is so in this case you can see that we have an issue with the bevel because this is angle-based So in this case if I wanted to maybe be a bit more selective about where I put my bevels Then I would come into here and we can select this by sharpen. I would basically set a bevel weight So we've put that bevel weight on these edges here and you can just kind of come in same way that we've done before you can come into This guy and just select bevel weight and then mark that as a bevel right and then under this one we can just set this as a weighted Bevel so now what that will do is it will bevel based on that selection So you can see that we can create nice smoothing as you can see here There's a little bit of cleanup to do But if you get that sort of all cleaned up and then you can mark out your bevels where you want that to be You can start to get that more smoothing out how it should be intended to be smoothed, right? so That's kind of how we would approach the different portions that we've worked on and when we've been modeling from the High-poly how we're going to optimize our geometry So that shows some of those techniques of how we can clean up our existing geometry and prep it in readiness for unwrapping.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Okay, so now we have our beetle high res mesh sort of figured out here. The next step is to basically turn this into a more finalized Nanite game ready mesh. So that's going to be our next steps as far as the tutorial are concerned. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show some techniques of how I actually optimize down the geometry because The moment you can see this is really, really dense. There's a lot of smoothing happening with turbo smoothing things like that. And although we want this to look really nice and detailed, we definitely don't need it to be as high poly as what we have here. We can cut down on some of the geometry. So the way I'm gonna generally work with this is we're going to come back into our working files that we have. So using the leg again as the sort of main example, because there's a lot of the challenges that we have in the legs are also gonna be present in all the other parts. So once we learn how to do it with the legs, we can easily do the body in the other parts. It's exactly the same workflow and technique. So one thing to note before we jump in is that I have actually separated out the feet a little bit. So you can see that these guys here, if we sort of come through, so we've got our different like foot pieces and everything here. So this is where we left the high poly before we have our feet with kind of more detail and everything here, the different pieces. So what I've done is I've made a foot which is created from collection instances. So each one of these is a separate section. So if we then jump back over into these pieces, these are the individual feet section. So if we kind of come through here, you can see we've got the first part of the foot, we've got the second part of the foot, the third part. And then we've got, This section is actually part of the toe and then we have this other claw section. So when you bring all of that together, you've essentially got each one of these pieces. These sections here, the intention with this was to have this kind of working in the sense that we could rotate it and everything. Let me just bring up the gizmo one second. All right, the gizmo wasn't showing because I had, I have transforms locked. So if I jump over to rotate, you can see this here. So this is kind of set up so that I can actually test the animation and that's something that is definitely helpful is sort of coming in here we showed before is locking the rotations and locations and things. So you can actually test the movement and see how this is going to interact and work. So you can see here that we can rotate these individual pieces and actually test our animation or how these are actually gonna move and articulate. So these sections here, this is the toe, so we can just rotate our toes this way, and then we can also rotate the claw as well. So it gives us a lot of movement and everything. So that's how this is now set up. I just wanted to recap that because I slightly changed how these guys are working, but it's using the same process as before where we use the instances, the collection instances, to sort of bring that in. And then I've just parented everything together so that you can move each one of these kind of individually. Everything nothing moves except this one. These guys are all just rotating, right? So that's kind of how the foot piece is working So then we will now want to jump into how do we actually optimize down some of this geometry and some of it's going to be easier than other parts especially if we've not Done any kind of quad remesh like in these cases a lot of this is quad remesh for preview So we're going to have to rework some of these but we'll we'll sort of go through that process The other thing I would like to do as well is set up a little bit of a Folder structure again as we did before in the other part so we can actually work on our Low poly pieces and start to see them together So to do that I would you can create new folders it wherever you want in terms of the structure and everything I'm probably just gonna create a new one Which is basically just gonna be our low poly or nanite mesh whatever you want to call it We'll call it low poly that's probably gonna be fine And then what I want to do here is I want to create one for the legs and I'm going to basically put all of my pieces from these collection instances Into here, so we'll just add those in so we'll start with the FEMA I like to basically in this case what I'm trying to achieve is I just want to add in a bunch of these Individual leg pieces and then we're going to effectively move them and kind of offset them from each other so that when we actually bake These later in substance that they're not going to interact with each other So we can just visually see them all but we're not going to have any issues So next we'll choose I want to go through and actually add the individual pieces of the feet So we'll come through here and just do that So this just means we can visually see each one of these and it might be easier to duplicate them and just add each foot in this way So as we optimize these will actually start to see How these are looking so Grab the claw and then we'll just add the toe in as well. Whoops duplicate that Okay, so that is all this is now basically all the pieces that we have of the leg Right, those are all the sections that we need and then as we work on this these collections We are actually going to Have have this this stuff Update right so that's the kind of aim there the other thing I would also say is that When I worked on this I duplicated the high poly So that I had a backup the other alternative you can also do is just save a slightly another version like an iterative version of Of the blender file. That's something that I would definitely suggest So that you have a backup as you work here, but I want to edit this geometry We have here is the geometry I want for the final mesh So I want it to update here and then I also want it to update on the final model of the beetle as well So it's easier for me to just do that directly in these particular Models here. So if you are going to do that, just remember that it's going to be Destructive so sometimes it's good to just have a backup for that stuff So using the FEMA as an example here I'm going to show some of the ways that I would actually Optimize this geometry and then get it ready for unwrapping. So We're focusing we'll cover unwrapping as the second part of this But I just want to show how I'm going to optimize this geometry So at the moment you can see that this is something like 300,000 triangles Which is a lot for just one section of the model So we don't need it to be anywhere near as dense as that and you can see that this is kind of broken down Into different pieces a lot of the ones that say re topo here are when we've run the quadri mesh So if we were to remove those we're left with these pieces, which are where they've actually been modeled a little bit more by hand So if you're approaching one that's been modeled by hand, this is usually pretty straightforward You would usually come in and see what the modifiers are doing as far as what we've got in here So you can see that I do Add bevels and boolean so we'll kind of go through each one of these and how we could optimize this So usually if I've got a bevel and it's not if it had lots and lots of sides like it was say 20 sided We probably wouldn't need it to be as dense as that so usually I'll pick something that you don't want it to look Too polygonal you want it to be pretty smooth in general So kind of check the silhouette and things like that and use reasonable amounts because we need to unwrap this So we don't want it to be super dense and hard to work with so it's kind of what we're doing here and Then as you can see we go through this process. We've got these different Booleans So usually the stuff that is The the booleans and things like that I would usually try and collapse down a lot of this stuff So we can go through that in a second and I'll I'll usually find a place where I want to collapse down So generally what I tend to do with stuff like this is I'll collapse down where the geometry is easily Workable and then if we've got something like a bevel that's beveling all the edges like this that becomes a lot harder to work with. So I leave that as a non-destructive. I don't collapse that down basically. So in this case, we would just come through and collapse all the elements, which now leaves us with this kind of base geometry for the object, right? And from this, we can now just clear all the edges. So I have a shortcut in hard ops for that, which we can just do here. So if we just do clear sharps, that's going to remove. Let's do that again. So, just undo this. So if you do clear sharps, it defaults to remove the modifier. So we'll just turn that off. And then we can just do a shade smooth. So now we have no hard edges or anything in the model. And then usually what I'll do is I'll just come through and if there's any sort of geometry that needs cleaning up, I'll just come through and remove that. So there's a couple of edges here. At the moment for something like this as well, I'm not worried about there being lots of endgones. N guns you can see that these are like crazy n guns and things like that. I'm not worried about that right this moment I just want to get everything as clean as possible And then usually I'll just go for and see if I can tidy up any verts or edges that aren't really looking that great So in here, we're just kind of connecting these up And then we can just yeah add in some extra edges to just tidy up what we can see here And then usually for something like this you can also add a triangulate modifier So if we do that you'll see this is what the the actual object is looking like when you add the triangulate on And you can sort of look at the different the details here and how this is coming together So some of this you can actually kind of clean up yourself So you can see here we could just kind of connect these up and where it makes sense I would just add in edges To kind of connect stuff up As I've been the line along the lines of this kind of stuff and we can just sort of come through and do a pass on that Try and add geometry that sort of makes sense to close up some of those endgones And then as you're working if try not to sort of repeat the same process over and over again You can see that this model is symmetryed so we can just mirror that and you can see that we can Update a lot of those edges and then I'll collapse down the mirror so you can see that that's already looking a lot better Generally when you're working with stuff you want to avoid really long thin triangles like you can see in these scenarios here like most of this stuff is pretty good. A lot of this is fine, but here we have these really long thin triangles which are not ideal. So we could then add like a couple of edges in there just to help that so that there's not as many long thin edges. So we could just put a couple of edges in here to do that. And then as we add the triangulate now you can see that that's definitely just a little bit cleaner. So that's going to look a bit better I think in terms of our topology. So this is already looking much nicer if we turn back on the other Parts of this model what you'll notice is that we've got a big kind of hole in the model And we have this big section in here And we don't need some of the faces that we can see on the back of this model So one things we can do here is we could delete these back faces and then we could take This stuff kind of forward a little bit more. So just sliding the edges until we get to a reasonable place there you can kind of see how that's working so you're not never going to see in there so as long as this is looking decent from from sort of most angles that's what you want to check you want to make sure that there's no you can't see any back faces and things like that but that's generally the process there so as far as kind of cleaning that mesh up you can sort of see that there we do have a couple of issues with the way that the bevel modifier is working at the moment so you can see that it's doing this weird kind of thing there. So what I would do in the bevel modifier is come down to where it says geometry and just turn off loop slide that's going to keep that really nice and clean. And then for a small bevel like this, you probably don't need to have six divisions. So I would maybe go for between something like four to two bevel depending on the size of it. If you need this to smooth a bit nicer, then you can obviously add a weighted normals to that or Alternatively you can turn on the harder normals in the bevel which will give you pretty nice smoothing So you can see sort of how that looks and it's all going to depend on the scale of this Actually in the model right so we're not going to see super close up to this. So maybe we don't need For on our bevel we could probably get away with three or two And that's probably going to look just fine for our model And it's going to be nice and easy to work with because the topology of this isn't too crazy So we're only looking at 4,000 triangles for this particular object at the moment, right? So this is definitely a lot easier to work with than what we had before And then we have our weighted normals if we wanted to add that and our triangulate Just collapse the mirror down and the triangulate will kind of keep all of the geometry nice and clean So if we export that into a game measure for baking we can add the triangulate to this so that's going to look pretty good and then Let's now kind of cover another example here. So that covers like how we would optimize and try and sort this out. If you've got these guys, it would probably be a good idea to maybe snap these. Let's just try and move that there. So that should be good. So yeah, you can just kind of straighten out the edges and things here. So that's a way that you might optimize something like that. For these pieces, these are even easier because the topology of this is already pretty good. So in this case, you could maybe remove a couple of the edge loops out of this if you wanted to. It's not like a huge issue, but yeah, maybe just remove a couple of edge loops out of that. You can see sort of the detail that we have. And then for this one, again, we've got the bevel modifier. So we can come in and choose like how many bevels we're gonna use on this, maybe four is fine. And then this has weighted normals as well. And then we can always add triangulate to this one. This one isn't gonna need triangulate apart from on the capped edges there. So if you wanted to add that in there, you can definitely do that. You can see how that's gonna fix up our center circle there. And then on this one, same kind of story, you can just go through. So that process is really straightforward for stuff where you've modeled the topology really nicely. Like if you've modeled something yourself, it's gonna be pretty easy to come through the modifiers and just enable and disable stuff. So here if I've got this object, you can see it has a Boolean applied. So usually what I'd be looking for here is collapsing everything apart from the last bevel. So if we're looking at this, you can see that we have our Boolean, we have our bevel applied. This actually does have subdivision, so we can choose if we want to add subdivision or not, which we can go over in a second, but I would collapse down the Boolean. So when I do that, I get this message saying, do you wanna make this a single object? It's basically because it's an instance. So the reason for that is because in some of my other pieces, I reuse that same section, right? I use it again in some of the feet and things like that. You can see this sort of sphere is on the end of this object. So it's the same object, right? So in this case, I wanted to basically unwrap this object once and then just reuse it. So what I would do in this case is basically make a folder under here and just call it instance, and then I can just move anything that I want to be an instance into that folder. So I know that it's an instance and not to include it when I do my baking and unwrapping, right? So that's just a bit of advice there, but we could collapse down this Boolean here And then, yeah, for optimizing this particular one, you can see that we have the subdivision as well. So I would probably just select everything and remove the mirrored part of this. And then this bevel is fine. For subdivision, you can definitely add subdivision in there, but you're gonna see that it's gonna add a huge amount of topology to this, which in this case, isn't going to make the object really that much smoother in a lot of cases. It's not the most optimal way to basically make things nice and smooth in this case. So what you could do is either use a lower subdivision amount, which is going to bring the topology down a lot. Or in the case of this, what I did, because it made it a lot easier to work with, was basically add extra divisions into parts where I want it to be smoother and then use my flow, set flow to basically smooth this out. Sometimes the set flow will do weird things like this, so you have to kind of scale them a bit manually. But you can see here that that can be a much better way to smooth out that silhouette and shape. In some cases, you just don't need that subdivision, right? So as we add the subdivision, it's going to smooth things, but in this case, you can't really tell much of a difference, and it's a lot higher topology for not a lot of gain. So in a lot of cases, I would just add in that subdivision myself manually and try to to clean up the topology, because I'm mostly focusing on how easy this is to work with when it comes to unwrapping and that kind of stuff. So we just don't need all of these edges sometimes when you're working with this mesh. You can still have it feel very smooth and interesting without having loads of topology being added. So you can sort of see that this is still looking very nice, even though it's not that much different when we add this subdivision. And again, it's all about scale and context, right? So when you sort of see this on the size you're gonna see it, it's not gonna be super detailed. So yeah, that covers like the basic process for things that are already modeled, like when you've got something that's in a pretty good spot like this, and it's just a case of removing a couple of modifiers and cleaning up the geometry and everything. One thing I do wanna cover though, is a scenario like this, where we have an edge on the inside, but some of it is kind of covered. So my tip for that is basically just applying a bit of an inset in here so that you get to a stage where you basically have a piece of the geometry that you're not gonna see you can remove because you don't want to UV that and waste UV space in there, but you still want a nice kind of rounded edge on this particular area. So that's an advice I'd give for things like that when you have a central piece kind of in there that you can't see is basically try to remove any geometry that isn't going to be seen. And you can do that by just in setting there. Okay, so now we've shown how to optimize some of the geometry where we've worked just with mostly modeling techniques such as Booleans and things like that. I wanna show where we've actually used something like the quadrime-measure to get more remesed topology and how we're actually gonna work with this type of information, right? So sometimes this can be pretty good its own topology you can see that if we look at this though the quadrature does have errors in some places so if you wanted to get clean topology you'd need to kind of come in and clean up some of these issues or go back to the original mesh that used to generate this and try and regenerate it so there's kind of two ways to approach this so let's turn these guys off and we'll just have a look at one of the examples so that's why I kept all of this stuff as as reference and as backups so that we can actually work with this stuff here. So we'll just turn on some of these modifiers here. You can see that we have this piece. So I'm gonna take this section here and you can see how this is actually looking, right? So for something like this, you can see the topology of this is around 5000 triangles. One approach is that we could collapse this down and then come in and manually clean up our topology, right? That's definitely a good could be a good approach depending on what it is. In this case, this is very organic. So we're probably not gonna save a huge amount of topology by doing that. So in this case, we could actually come in with the quadrille measure and try and use that topology as our final topology for the model. So let's kind of get back to where that is. And so with that, you just basically wanna come in here and turn on these different options and experiment with the topology you're gonna get from remeshing this. So if we remesh this now, we need to make sure that we don't have our symmetry enabled and we run our remesh. And so you can see that that does create some pretty clean topology. And in the case of this as well, we're not gonna need a lot of this underside geometry as well. So this could actually be a pretty good mesh. You can see that it's around 9,000. We could experiment with lower as well if we wanted to try to get to closer to our topology from before. So let's kind of go from, to say 3000. And you can see this is what we get. And then sometimes you can notice like you have errors. So in this case, this one wouldn't be too difficult to kind of manually clean up there. So yeah, and again, sort of here as well, you can see there's a little error on the edges there. So as you get lower, you start to run into some slight errors on the edges. There are also things you can kind of clean up in here as well. So if we were to work with this particular mesh, we've got say edges in here that we definitely don't need. So we can remove that. Same for this, like we're not gonna ever see into here. So we can just basically clean up a lot of this, just selecting all of these particular sections here, and just basically removing that. So I'm just gonna select all of that. And you can just remove these parts. And then it would be the same here. So I found it pretty helpful when I was doing stuff like this to basically just come in here and select with Seam so if I go into here, and then I can just basically draw around The edges here and the reason I'm keeping like a buffer I'll show you that in a second if I come through here So you can just select all of this and then just mark that and then do a selection and select by Seam so we just missed one there. Let's do that If we select by scene, this is going to select this island. We can remove it And so now you can see that this is pretty low topology There's a couple of bits like that we would potentially want to kind of clean up in here But you can sort of see that we've got something that would be Usable as like a final geometry there the reason we keep that that buffer is because if we wanted to apply Say a bevel modifier to this then we can keep this nice edge. So if we were to increase the bevel size of this a little bit, let's kind of punch that in. Whoops, I meant to do it on this one. Okay, so yeah, so now you can see that this keeps that nice seam that we have in there, like the panel line seam by adding that bevel in there. So that's why we keep the geometry kind of underneath. If we didn't have this, so if we select like a bunch of this stuff and just remove it, you'll see that we don't get that nice bevel on there anymore. So you don't get a nice transitional seam there. So that's one of the reasons why we're keeping that geometry in the inside there. And it just allows us to have a nice seam there. So this is one way to work with the quad-remesh topology. Another way, and we'll go for this particular example, because this is an example where I didn't rely on the quad-remesh topology there. So if we hide this guy and turn on some of our retopode areas, you can see that I have done a quad-remeshed version of this. So that's what that kind of looks like, right? So if we just were to actually work with the original topology, what you'll see here is that these are a lot more hard-edge shapes. So we don't need to worry so much about, we've got flatter sections of the model. So we can definitely do this cheaper in its original topology. So for this, I would basically just come in and clean this up. So it's the same process as before. We choose like the different details. And you can see here that as we kind of smooth out a lot of these areas, we have modifiers that we're using where there's a lot of topology, like the bevel for example has seven sides. We could say optimize that down. This cutter that's in here has a bevel with a lot of sides on it. So again, we can just come in and reduce the amount of sides, which is gonna save us time when it comes to optimizing, right? So we can come through here and just check all of these. And then we've got this other one. So we would come into this guy and basically reduce the amount of bevels here. And then that would be starting to look pretty good. It's not looking too bad. And then we have this cut in here. So that's now maybe some topology that we could actually work with. So we can remove this subdivision and just apply all the modifiers and in this case you could you can actually keep the backup Right, so if you wanted to just duplicate this and pull this in here as our final topology Then we can turn off our references and collapse this down and keep that geometry So in this case what I would probably do here is where we have got our quadrime meshed version of this We can just delete that and the same for this guy as well where we've got our Quadrimeshed version we can just remove that and this is now going to be The final topology we actually have for our model right and the same for this guy This is going to require a lot of cleanup. So what you can see here is There's just like a lot of issues in general with Lots of kind of vertices and things like that where it's not super clean So there's a few ways to kind of tackle that Firstly what I would do is just run Remove all of the sharp angles and edges so you can sort of see that that just keeps everything nice and smooth And then what I would do in places like this is usually there's a couple of tools you can use like the mesh machines boolean cleanup can be really great for this so if you You run this you can basically use it to kind of weld up all the verts that you have from a Boolean So that can definitely be a good way to optimize geometry that you can see there So that's like a really quick way To get rid of things like this. You basically just run the Boolean cleanup. Sometimes this will fail But it is a really nice tool that can basically save you you a lot of time So especially when you've got stuff like this going on where it's just just a mess of vertices where the Booleans have kind of Interacted and you just want to really quickly Clean that up and you can see at the moment It's kind of welding these guys to this geometry if you want it to be the other way around you just do a mouse wheel And it will basically do it the opposite way which can keep I want to keep the silhouette of the rounding of this So that's what I'm doing there You can see that we Optimize that geometry really quickly and then you can always just go with the manual approach as well Right just kind of manually coming in here and welding up vets or connecting them and remember the tip I showed before is don't do this work twice. You can see that this is mirrored So we just add a mirror modifier to that and then for something like this as well We'd want to add a bevel so if we add the bevel you'll start to see where the bevel is working pretty well And then in places where it's not that usually means that we're looking at an area where there's some vertices that we need to kind of come in and clean up so you can see here that this is a section where we'd want to come in and weld those and then we've got a much more bevel that's actually working so and turn our loop slide back off and you can start to see here so in this one this is mostly to do with some of the edges plus also it's to do with the angle as well so another thing you can also do if you've got that are very close to each other is just do a merge by distance which will sometimes fix up any really small verts and you can see this is definitely getting into a much nicer kind of look here and yeah we can see here that we just want to sort of shift some of our verts to get some smoothing so if you see the bevel kind of overshoot like this you can just move your edges and things a little bit and that's going to clean that up so yeah so you can start to see kind of how that's working you probably wouldn't even want a bevel that's as large as this so if you're going for say point three you can see that we're getting pretty clean topology now on this particular object and this has obviously been worked up From a boolean mesh here, so you can sort of see how that's looking It's definitely getting into a much better place So that is my workflow if I'm working with something where I've quadrimeshed it Usually I have the backup of the topology some things are going to be harder to clean up than others So like as an example This particular section is going to be really easy to clean up right because it's not complicated We can come back into our references here Find that piece and you can see that that's not going to be a hard thing to tidy up a tool So it'd be pretty easy so it depends on the piece and and the complexity of what you've got going on in there But yeah, definitely having those reference assets that you worked with before before you run a quick quadrature Is really good because we can always come back to those and we can work them back up again So that's kind of the aim and we we just want everything to feel like it has a relatively even quad flow and we're probably aiming for things to not be super dense and generally We want to try to make sure that things smooth nicely at this stage because this is going to be our final mesh And we're also not going to be using a High to low poly bake we're not going to be using normal maps To bake in the geometry. We're mostly just going to be relying on the geometry itself So that's definitely something that you want to consider And then the other thing as well is so in this case you can see that we have an issue with the bevel because this is angle-based So in this case if I wanted to maybe be a bit more selective about where I put my bevels Then I would come into here and we can select this by sharpen. I would basically set a bevel weight So we've put that bevel weight on these edges here and you can just kind of come in same way that we've done before you can come into This guy and just select bevel weight and then mark that as a bevel right and then under this one we can just set this as a weighted Bevel so now what that will do is it will bevel based on that selection So you can see that we can create nice smoothing as you can see here There's a little bit of cleanup to do But if you get that sort of all cleaned up and then you can mark out your bevels where you want that to be You can start to get that more smoothing out how it should be intended to be smoothed, right? so That's kind of how we would approach the different portions that we've worked on and when we've been modeling from the High-poly how we're going to optimize our geometry So that shows some of those techniques of how we can clean up our existing geometry and prep it in readiness for unwrapping."
+    }
+  ]
+}