Sculpting in Blender

Sculpting in Blender

In Blender, our teacher showed us the sculpting tab. The Sculpting Tab in Blender is used to sculpt meshes, mainly for making realistic human models or for adding details to food models like odd crevices to a doughnut. Before getting used to Blender's Sculpting Tab, we messed around with many of the sculpting tools such as the inflate, etc.,

And then, for a little task, we had to have two cube meshes in the viewport. Then, I renamed both meshes, one naming "cube_low" and the other "cube_high". Then I selected mesh "cube_high", added in a Sub-Surf Modifier, and added loop cuts and brought them right to the original edges of the cube mesh. The reason why this was done is because, when applying a Sub-Surf modifier to a cube, it deforms it, making it look like an odd cylinder. So, adding loop cuts and bringing them, really tight to the original edges of the cube, can bring back it's shape. Once all that's done, I applied the sub-surf modifier. Make sure that you applied the Sub-Surf modifier to the "cube_high" mesh, only.

Now, moving on to the sculpting tab. I enabled Dynamic Toplogy (Dyntopo) mode as it creates more topology as you sculpt a mesh. For this task, it was more, do what you want, kind of task so, I used the inflate tool to bring out some bumps, odd crevices, odd marks on each side of the cube. This is what my high-poly cube looks like after testing out various sculpting tools in Blender;

So, after doing some sculpting, it's time to export both low & high-poly versions of the cube mesh as an .fbx file. Why did I do this? So, we can import the meshes into Substance Painter. And why did I needed to use Substance Painter? Well, I'll be baking my high-poly version of my mesh onto the low-poly version & making it a normal map. 

After exporting both meshes as an .fbx, open up Substance Painter. You'll then be greeted with a series of settings before opening a new project file;

In this menu, choose the template; "PBR - Metallic Roughness (algorithmic)". Then make sure to select your low-poly mesh. To do this, underneath the "File" section, press "Select" a file browser will pop up, find where you've saved your .fbx files & select the low-poly .fbx file. Finally, set your resolution to 2048 & hit "OK". 

After setting that up, you should see Substance Painter imported the low poly mesh in the viewport. 

If your viewport in Substance looks like this, this means you've imported your low-poly mesh successfully. Now, moving on to baking our high-poly version of the mesh on to our low-poly. It may seem impossible but, in fact it's easy. Simply, go to your "Texture Set Settings" tab, scroll down & select "Bake Mesh Maps. Next, a window will pop up; 

Set the output to 2048, then in the "High Definition Meshes" box find your high-poly mesh and select that;

Once everything is selected & you've set the output to "2048", click on "Bake Selected Textures. 

This is what the viewport should look like if you've done it right;

So, far we've duplicated a low-poly version of our mesh and made it into a high poly version. We've enabled Dynamic Topology which can allow us to sculpt on our high poly mesh, exported both versions of the mesh as a .fbx file so we can import them into Substance & finally bake our high poly version of the mesh onto our low poly of the mesh as that will add the detail of our high poly mesh without adding any extra vertices to the low-poly mesh.

If we go into the viewport settings and set the preview to "Normal + Height + Mesh" you can see the sculpting patterns I've made in Blender are displayed as a normal map. You can see the marks I sculpted yet it doesn't add any extra vertices. That's how useful & clever normal maps can be.

Overall, this task went very well, in my opinion. It gave me a very good overview in how you can make custom normal maps for low poly models & setting them up in Substance made it fun, exciting & easy.