Tips and tricks

From FreeGameDevWiki

This is a collection of tips and tricks for newbies in the world of 3d modelling, texturing et cetera!

Use increments

When having more complex pieces of work, it's rewarding to use increments, meaning to save your work steps on your model or texture into files with increasing number, so you can leap back and have backups if something goes wrong. For example:

boat00.blend - the beginning of your basic shape

boat01.blend - your shape worked out

boat02.blend - shape finished

boat03.blend - basic unwrapping

boat04.blend - unwrapped 1/4

boat05.blend - unwrapped 1/3

boat06.blend - trying a different UV layout

etc.

boat19.blend - finished model with UVs

Same can be very handy for textures and basically everything else, too. Even doing it not regularly (eg. if you forget it once or twice) can help a lot.

Organized Folder Structure

After having worked on a great bunch of textures and models, you'll surely have a lot of junk that might become useful later and a lot of reference images, maybe paint brushes that you don't want to dig out of your GIMP folder again when there's the need to change them, backups, etc. Like in a real working environment, keeping yourself organized helps a lot. For example, create a seperate folder for every new model you make (especially if you do increments), keep texture references sorted in source and license, etc., categorize textures usefully (eg. textures/grass/, textures/wood/), keep renders of models in one folder, skyboxes in another, and so on. Programs like DigiKam can make the sorting and viewing of textures and texture references a lot easier.