Introduction

In this activity I texturize the two models from the previous work with the Blender Bros Material Works addon and bake the materials so that they are game ready.

Workflow

First of all I grouped the different elements of the model and assigned them vertex groups to maintain the distinction of materials in the same object.

After creating the new materials with the Material Works plugin, I used the “Remap Users” function in the blender materials to link all instances of the sample material I used to the new material:

Selecting all the parts of the robot in “faces” editing mode, I make a smart UV project to get the UV map

To create the materials I use Material Works, from Blender Bros. The beauty of this plugin is that it allows you to generate metals with different layers of wear that can be configured at will. I have paid special attention to the wear of the edges to highlight more the silhouette of the hard surface figures.

And once I’ve done all this, it’s time to bake the textures. This step cost much more than expected, since all the tools I had to bake either gave errors or did not create a coherent UV map. Following the tutorial ” Blender Baking Textures in less that 1 Minute using Omniverse “, I decided to use the Envidia Omniverse implementation in Blender.

Unfortunately, with this method, for some reason, the error  
Circular dependency for image “Basic_Metal_basecolor.png” from object “Cube.029_baked”  appeared (example). After trial and error I discovered that it occurred due to the shared use of the instances of the textures of the Material Works plugin, so to fix it I went one by one in the nodes of the textures making the instances unique (single-user copy):

This process turns into tedious what at first I thought was going to be simple (that’s not counting the various other tests I did by baking with Blender’s native tool, using the Bystedts Blender Baker plugin…). Even so, I think that Omniverse is a very powerful tool and if you create the textures yourself properly it can be a great ally (yes, its computational cost is high).

Here we have the result with the procedural textures:

And here are the Omniverse textures:

However, just before starting to texturize the V2 robot I came across this tutorial: Blender to Unreal and Unity – Export and Bake Anything , which mentioned an addon that I still hadn’t tried: Principled Baker.

And after testing it, I came to the conclusion that it was a much better option, since it was more efficient, it didn’t give me an error with my textures and the UV map was more faithful to the procedural textures. Here an example:

In this case I could add the  decals  I wanted by following this tutorial , and using Chuck_CG’s resources on Gumroad: https://chuckcg.gumroad.com/l/SXxhW?layout=profile

In the case of the logos, belonging to each model, I asked ChatGPT to create some illustrations with the synopsis of the previous work as input and retouched them with Photoshop:

For texturing you can see a time-lapse with the already optimized workflow:

Final UV map:

Sketchfab models

V1 Robot textured by Kanki on Sketchfab

V2 Robot textured by Kanki on Sketchfab

Final thoughts

Looking back, the process has been more intense and tedious than I expected. And to be honest, I haven’t even spent much time on the UV map (also because I think the procedural textures make the section cuts barely noticeable). Even so, I should have given more room when unfolding, since some faces overlap.

I am quite satisfied with the final work, although to facilitate the process I had to combine all the objects into one. We will see how that affects the following phases of the project.

References

Resources

Material works . (n.d.). Blender Market. https://blendermarket.com/products/material-works

Daniel Enger (n.d.). GitHub – danielenger/Principled-Baker: Blender Add-on: Bake PBR textures with a few clicks . GitHub. https://github.com/danielenger/Principled-Baker

Develop on NVIDIA Omniverse platform . (n.d.). NVIDIA Developer. https://developer.nvidia.com/omniverse

Sci Fi decal Kpack for blender and Kit Ops . (n.d.). Gumroad. https://chuckcg.gumroad.com/l/SXxhW?layout=profile

Tutorials

dare (2023, July 23). How to Add Decals/Logos to Any Model in Blender New update!!! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cev__NKXZe8

Markom3D. (2022, January 6). Blender Baking Textures in less than 1 Minute using Omniverse [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6i–hhNt5M

GDT Solutions. (2022, January 7). How to EXPORT 3D model WITH PACKED TEXTURES from Blender to Unity – Extract textures in Unity [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYf4QnzXynQ

dariomac (2021, September 30). Blender to unreal and unity – export and bake anything [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhecWp8AcDI