Blender Game Asset Modeling Tutorial (Part 7) 

same here

so do i

You're right. At the time of making this video, I didn't like using Auto-smooth as it gave me a lack of control over where the hard edges were. Now however, I've changed my workflow and I use auto-smooth all the time. I'm tempted to take these Blender tutorials down (even though they are my most popular videos) because they are rather out of date.

@@AlienMinefield ok. Well if I where you I wouldn't remove them I would just make a new set and direct people from this series to the updated seires

Do not to take tutorials down. They are still good if you are proficient with current interface.

@@AlienMinefield please don't do it, because even if they have some tings that you don't like rn, most of the content is very helpful! maybe just add some comments to the description would be enough if there is something you really don't like. Thanks for the tutorial!

You're right! In this tutorial, I'm using version 2.7 which did not have the ability to select sharp edges from the toolbar. While auto-smooth is certainly useful, I don't use it here because the cables on the side have edges that are 90 degrees which need to be smooth. All of these meshes would eventually be combined into one object (for batching purposes) and if I tweaked the auto-smooth to accommodate those cables, much of the rest of the model would have been smooth too that didn't need to be. Also, using the edge split modifier gives me control over exactly which edges are sharp and which are not. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you need one edge in a loop to be sharp and the very next edge needs to be smooth, and having control over individual edges is helpful.

This seems to be an issue with the most recent version (2.78, this tutorial was made in 2.70), but Blender can't export smoothing groups based on the edge split modifier and sharp edges. It can only do so when using auto-smooth. Smoothing groups are vitally important if you want to bake details from high resolution meshes and optimize your geometry for games. Smooth edges and vertices render faster than sharp edges and vertices because sharp edges have two sets of vertex normals. So you want to keep as many edges smooth as possible. That wasn't possible on this model because almost all of them had to be sharp. You can still use the edge split modifier for non-skinned meshes if you apply it upon export, then it will look the same as it does in Blender.

It matters. The smooth shading creates something known as 'smoothing groups'. The smoothing groups are exported as part of the mesh and will render in the game engine exactly as they appear in Blender. Smooth edges also render faster than hard edges because hard edges actually require two sets of vertex normals to be calculated per edge as opposed to just one with a smooth edge. So you should try to make as many edges smooth as you can.

One of two things could be happening. 1) There is a seam along the frame that hasn't been cut. (Frameworks like the one on this object require a lot of seams to unwrap properly) 2) The object has a non-uniform scale. You can check this in the Object Data tab in the Properties panel or hit Ctrl + A and choose "Apply Scale"

If you watch my Assembly Crane texturing series, I go over the techniques I use for hard surface texturing. All the techniques I use in that series I used on this asset. The only thing that isn't covered in that is the normal mapping process I go through in nDo, which I will cover in another tutorial series later.

Blender's built in packing algorithm is very inefficient. Also, Smart UV tends to create many, many UV shells as the only criteria for cutting an edge is the angle between the faces it connects. In game development, having more UV seams means having more vertices to draw so keeping the UV islands to a minimum is crucial. Also, I pack everything manually so I can both make the most efficient use of the UV space possible and it allows me to have overlapping UVs. The more space the UV shells can take up, the more texture resolution I can fit onto the model.

AlienMinefield ok thanks

No. It is for 3d-Coat. This is a game asset and the most popular game engines available today (Unity and Unreal) use a Physically Based Rendering pipeline. Blender isn't very good with texturing for this workflow. 3d-Coat and Substance Painter are built from the ground-up for metalness/roughness texture painting. I use 3d-Coat because it is cheaper and simpler.

But 3Dcoat isn't exactly cheaper then Substance..