So I'm making models for this game I'm working on. It's going OK so far, but I'm learning Blender at the same time, so it very often feels like I'm missing things that could make my workflow easier or that I'm not using the program to its full capabilities.
There are of course a plethora of tutorials, but they often don't feel relevant for what I'm doing (relatively low-poly tanks) or I have a specific question that they sort of answer, but it's in a context where I end up having to manually do a lot of fine-tuning to make the process work with what I'm doing.
Should I just start from scratch and spend a few weeks learning a bunch about the program that may or may not be useful to me? Carry on doing things the hard way? Is it all the hard way in the end?
I dunno, just feeling pretty out of my depth and questioning what I'm capable of.
For instance I just did UV layouts for my first model, (separated into several simpler objects, thankfully) and it took a long time of individually moving vertices on the map and copy pasting coordinates to get it comprehensible. I don't even know where to go from there. What if I want to do bump-mapping? What do I do when some of my objects have island errors when I unwrap?
This motherfucker just learned about select sharp edges and mark seam ahahahahah
one more thing down.
Do you know how to add control loops and the basics of quad modeling? There's a really good series of articles on quad modeling that helped me with flow.
Low poly will usually require conversion to tris, but the modeling processes is easier if you maintain a quad flow
A model with good topology can easily switch between high and low poly variants
Also, the auto unwrap in Blender works amazingly well with models that have good topology.
For everything else, check out the Blender Community discord.