Is This The Easiest 3D Art Tool Ever? (Adobe Modeler Tutorial)

when I first opened up adobe substance 3D modeler I was a bit confused I'm being honest it's completely different than something like blender which I'll typically use that for my indie games but as you'll find out at the end of this video after playing around with it for a few hours I was honestly kind of hooked it's easy to learn it's fun to use it's almost playful um it's a quick and snappy way to make organic models both for beginners small indd developers but also it could be used to create higher Fidelity models for big budget projects it's not without its caveats though I'll tell you all of those even though this video is sponsored by Adobe I'll be honest with you and tell you those few caveats at the end of this video but come along with me and I'm going to jump inside of modeler and I'm going to show you how to quickly make a beautiful character model with just a few simple shapes and just keep in mind I'm only going to cover modeling in this video it's a lot to cover uh if you want to learn how to paint and texture this model there's a link in the description okay so as we open up the software I think it's super important to take note of what

this modeling tool is for modeler uses a voxal approach which is very different than blender this is great for organic models mainly because it's non-destructive what that means it's kind of hard to explain but what it means is you you can take a bunch of shapes and smash them together and if you want to move them they'll like they'll morph and change and you can sort of just it's like slamming clay together this basically means that modeler doesn't have to worry about topology or managing faces this is great for organic models like characters but it's not necessarily the best option for hard surface models but guess what that's normal for games for my indie game Twisted Tower we actually used two completely different tools one for hard surface models and one for organic models modeler would have been a great option for the organic surfaces in Twisted Tower had I known about it at the time I know that sounds confusing so let me show you what I mean all right so we've got Adobe modeler open here I'm just going to go ahead and click new new

and if I rightclick and click create a new primitive I'm just going to create an ellipsoid or a sphere all right so in order to rotate around your selected object in this case the sphere I'm just going to press alt and click and I can rotate around my sphere if I press alt and then middle click I could sort of pan around the scene like this if I want to zoom in I just use the scroll wheel and if I want to change the lighting I press shift and rightclick and you can see it's shifting our single directional light in the scene this is not going to get exported with our object this is really just for us as the modeler to see different shades right if I want to move the object around I can obviously click these little arrows here pretty intuitive here I can rotate the the

object like this and I can scale it using these little gray handles here now if I want to scale it uniformly I could scale it like this now one of my favorite hot Keys is pressing shift alt and click and then moving my mouse quickly and it positions us at different rotations right so if I want to get a bottom view or a top view really quickly I could just press shift alt and click and rotate accordingly now really quickly if I want to change the resolution of my mesh I can select it rightclick and click plus or minus be careful pressing this too fast because I've noticed that in Adobe modeler you might get a crash here so always save before you adjust your resolution and also don't click these

too fast hoping that adobe fixes this with a patch soon all right so now that we know how to navigate our scene I'm just going to select this object I'm going to delete it so that we're starting fresh here I'm going to delete everything in our outliner here and I'm going to go ahead and create my first object for our character I'm going to right click create a new primitive create a sphere now you can see here that it's automatically created the Primitive inside have something called A Primitive container and this is all shown in my outliner to kind of get to the point here A Primitive container is basically just I don't know a group of different objects that interact with one another kind of like clay so if I wanted to and I created another let's say Cube you can see it's placed inside of my primitive container here and I can move it over and what do you see there you see it's blending with the sphere I can even

change the blend settings and look it starts to morph together I can even copy this sphere paste it with contrl c and control V and you can see because we're inside of this primitive container these are all children of this primitive container you could see that it's all blending together pretty cool so if I go back in time here with control Z and just start with my sphere you can see that if I try and paste this sphere to create let's say some eyes they're blending in with the sphere now that's really cool and that's going to be helpful in the future but I don't necessarily want the eyeballs to blend in with the head so what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete that sphere we're not inside the sphere again you can just look up here at the outliner if I select the sphere this will turn blue and that means I'm inside the Primitive container and I'm editing objects in side of it so I'm going to press escape

and make sure I'm outside of it that's no longer blue here and what I can do is create another primitive container in this case another sphere I'm going to scale it down I'm going to move it over here let's go to front view by pressing shift alt and then click and rotate towards the front here now if we want to get a perfect angle you can actually select this sphere here and again press shift alt and click and now it's perfectly front-facing that object now I could select this primitive container here this is our eyeball I'm going to scale it down a little bit move it over if I copy the Primitive container not the object inside of it but the full primitive container if I copy that and then paste it I can actually click this symmetry flip selection button and it's going to flip it along the vertical Center here

now that we've got these perfectly flipped eyes that are mirroring each other why not just go ahead and combine the eyes into one primitive container so I can actually just click this and drag it into this one and now I have this single primitive container here and then this single primitive container here for the face I highly recommend staying organized renaming layers as you create them because I promise it's going to get really really complicated and you'll be confused if you can't look to your outliner and see what everything is labeled let's go ahead and create a nose it's just a new primitive container with a sphere and then hey we'll also create a new primitive container with a sphere for the ears let's squash that ear a little bit let's copy that primitive container flip it along the axis and voila we've got mirrored ears and a nose okay let's make the hair this is where primitive containers are going to start to make sense Adobe modeler is great for

creating these organic looking meshes right so if I wanted to create a character with really curly hair I could well create a new sphere inside of a new primitive container and then I could just make a bunch of spheres inside of that container and they're going to merge and blend together and make the hair look fluffy so again this is really cool because if I decide to go to Disney World for a week and then after that I go to Peru for a week and then I come back to my studio and I open up modeler and I open up my file if I want to tweak the hair I don't have to click a face or click an edge or click a verticy and tweak it change it there I can literally just take these abstract shapes and move them around all right let's press Escape exit the container and let's create a new primitive container let's create the Torso look we don't have to just use spheres for this character we can actually use well let's use a cube and we can adjust the settings in the left here to taper it and make it look more like a torso let's scale it up a bit and then do a little trick here to make the the bottom of the shirt look like it's

cleanly cut and not rounded to do that we'll create another box and then select this carve function here Isn't that cool this is in essence what modeler is about there's a bunch of cool functions here that you can try out and play with and the best part is again they're not permanent right we can tweak them and change them on the fly whenever we want just like the hair I want to create a new primitive shape for the arms so the bicep the forearm the hand I kind of want all of these to be one big mesh so I'm just going to create some capsules I'm going to taper them a little bit I'm going to adjust the blend settings I'm going to use spheres to create the hand I'm going to rotate the fingers a little bit and just adjust the blend settings and look it's all one mesh but at its core it's actually a bunch of different shapes inside of a primitive container now you'll begin to notice it's important to keep track of the order of

your layers inside the context of a primitive container the order of things really do matter look it's not the same as Photoshop layers Photoshop layers it's basically whatever's on top of something in a layer means that it's actually on top of it like physically whereas this it's different it's actually more like the order of operations now I'm going to click fast forward here and speed up the process a bit because from here on out guys that's basically the process [Music] [Music] all right finally I can clean up my layers name things accordingly and then

hey let's assign some colors to various shapes keep in mind these colors are mainly for reference and honestly you don't even need to do this I kind of just did it to make it look pretty for you guys we won't be using these colors in our final product though instead we'll be using substance 3D painter to paint this character all right finally let's export this model so we have a nice clean fbx for our game so there's a bunch of settings here we can first off pick our presets there's vender 3D printing Maya Adobe painter Stager Unreal Engine 5 I'd love to see a Unity preset but who who knows maybe Adobe will do that but a bunch of other settings here some cool ones to take note of I'm not going to go through every single one but some cool ones to take note of is we could definitely do the format fbx is sort of the one that I always like to use it's kind of industry standard for for indie games but an important feature to take note of is the target poly count we can choose all the way down to you know 10 all the way up

to 45,000 but there's no hard fast rule about the correct Target poly count for me I'm going to do a Target poly count of 50,000 because we're going to do a nice 4K render and I'm going to do some close-ups so I want some smoother lines all right now that we have a nice T pose exported we'll bring it into Adobe substance 3D painter to paint and texture it we can then rig it in blender if we wanted to and bring it into unity and real but that's a completely different topic for another video now to conclude here here are some things that I'm hopeful that adobe is going to add to modeler firstly I'd love to see the export options occurring in real time like a tiny little window that shows you kind of what your model is going to look like so that I can pick my export settings based on what I'm seeing in that window it's kind of challenging to guess and check what I need my export settings to be also look Adobe has mixo mixo is a great rigging system I wish

that it was incorporated inside of modeler so having mixo along with its animation library inside of modeler would be a huge huge bonus overall modeler is unique it's fun it's a really easy tolearn tool for beginners and it's great for voxal based modeling it has a ton of potential and I'll definitely be using it for some models in my games and by the way if you're interested in trying out substance 3D modeler and painter now is the the perfect time as epic games new Marketplace Fab is currently offering substance 3D painter and modeler completely free for 6 months when you either list a new product for sale or just spend 25 bucks on Fab which even just for the licenses themselves is an amazing deal the campaign ends on May 31st so be sure to grab this offer and redeem your license code before then if you'd like to try out substance 3D painter or modeler or if you'd simply like to have a really good deal on your next six months you can do this by

simply clicking the link in the description