Hard Surface Modeling Techniques for Game Production

What the talk is about

Yan Shamarin explains how hard surface models are built for game production and compares four ways of making a high-poly. His key requirements are likeness to the reference, clean shading and correct smoothing groups (soft edges below roughly 60 degrees, hard above), because shading errors on the high-poly carry into normal maps and textures. For low-poly he advises against chasing an arbitrary triangle limit and suggests a guideline instead, such as a table of edge counts per circle diameter. The methods are classic subdivision (full control, but slow and takes years to master), CAD surfaces (fast, but hard to edit after conversion to polygons), boolean plus Dynamesh in ZBrush (quick and simple, with export caveats), and boolean in a polygon editor followed by rebuilding the mesh. Useful for 3D artists who model weapons, vehicles and props.